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Deep & Emerging Tech·August 6, 2026·1 min read

How Trump's push for data centers is driving a boom in gas power plants, and a look at Meta's El Paso data center, which will have 813 gas-burning generators

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Data center growth tied to policy support is driving a parallel boom in gas-fired generation—Meta’s El Paso site planning 813 gas generators is one concrete example of the tradeoff. Infra and AI operators need to model not just power availability and cost, but also regulatory and community pushback around emissions-heavy backup plans.

Deep & Emerging Tech

Sources: Nvidia in talks to invest up to $3B in SoftBank-backed data center developer SB Energy that aims to IPO soon and is behind a huge OpenAI campus in Ohio

Nvidia moving up the stack into a $3B stake in SB Energy — builder of OpenAI’s Ohio campus — shows that control of powered land and data center development is becoming as strategic as control of GPUs. If you’re planning large-scale AI workloads, you now have to underwrite your counterparties’ power, land, and financing risk, not just their cloud SKU roadmap.

Deep & Emerging Tech

‘The Qualcomm chipset offers very good performance for still image processing, but for video, it’s not good enough’: Honor explains why it created a dedicated imaging chipset for its gimbal-equipped Robot Phone

Honor bolting a custom imaging chip next to Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 is another data point that generic SoCs are hitting limits for real-time video and on-device vision. If your product depends on differentiated camera or AR behavior, start modeling the cost and supply risk of going semi-custom instead of assuming the base mobile silicon will catch up.