After a crazy 2025, everyone in the data center industry deserved a proper break over the Christmas period. The world, however, keeps on turning, and there were more than a few eye-catching stories in the last weeks of 2025 and the first days of 2026.

Here’s a quick recap of some major news you might have missed over the Christmas period:

SoftBank to buy DigitalBridge: Digital infrastructure investment fund DigitalBridge – which owns stakes in AtlasEdge, DataBank, Switch, Takanock, Vantage, Yondr, and others – is set to be acquired by Japanese technology giant SoftBank for $4 billion.

Nvidia to license Groq chip tech, hires leadership: GPU giant Nvidia plans to license technology from AI chip startup Groq, and hire its leadership team. Though the deal is not an outright acquisition, it is reportedly worth up to $20 billion.

Alphabet acquires Intersect Power: Google’s parent company acquired energy firm Intersect Power for $4.75 billion. The deal will benefit Google as it looks to build out more data center capacity.

Goodman forms €8 billion data center platform with CPP: Real estate firm Goodman Group teamed up with the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board to establish an €8 billion (US$9.4bn) European data center partnership. Frankfurt, Amsterdam, and Paris are being initially targeted.

Elon Musk’s xAI targets third Memphis data center: Elon Musk’s AI startup, xAI, has bought another building in Memphis, Tennessee, for a planned data center. The third building, apparently known as Macrohardrr, could potentially bring the company’s compute capacity up to “almost 2GW.”

OADC acquires legacy NTT data centers in South Africa: Pan-African data center firm Open Access Data Centres (OADC) is acquiring a portfolio of South African facilities from NTT. The portfolio comprises legacy facilities from NTT’s acquisition of Dimension Data.

Best of the rest: Late December and early January also saw one person injured at a data center construction site in Finland; a telephone exchange fire in India; Nscale lease 40MW of capacity at an upcoming data center in North Carolina; Applied Digital look to spin-off its cloud business and merge it with a robotics company; AirTrunk reportedly explore a REIT listing in Singapore; Trump Media plan a merger with a fusion company; and the Saudi Arabian government break ground on a massive new data center complex in Riyadh.