Top 5 Data Center Stories, Week of May 20

For your weekend reading, here are some of this week's most popular stories on Data Center Knowledge:

Digital Realty Buys Eight Equinix Data Centers in Europe - Digital Realty Trust has acquired eight data centers in Europe from Equinix, which committed to selling the facilities last year as one of the conditions for regulatory approval of its $3.8 billion acquisition of the European data center giant TelecityGroup.

How Long Will the Cloud Data Center Land Grab Last? - The biggest data center providers are now operating in uncharted waters. The rising tide of public cloud deployments, combined with the paradigm shift in enterprise IT toward hybrid architectures, which combine cloud services with colocation, has created a perfect storm of demand for providers.

Google Has Built Its Own Custom Chip for AI Servers

The Tensor Processing Unit board. The TPU is a chip, or ASIC, Google designed in-house specifically to power Artificial Intelligence systems in its data centers. (Photo: Google)

This is the first time Google has shared any information about the hardware backend that powers its AI, which will play a central role in the company’s revamped cloud services strategy, announced earlier this year.

Aligned Beefs up Management Team with Hires from Rival Firms

Entrance to the data center in Plano, Texas, operated by Aligned Data Centers (Photo: Aligned Data Centers)

Since about one year ago, the company has been beefing up its senior management team, attracting eight new members from rivals as well as companies it does not compete with directly.

HPE Makes $100M Bet on Startups

Meg Whitman, CEO of Hewlett Packard Enterprise in New York City in November, 2015. (Photo by Andrew Burton/Getty Images)

Putting money into startups is a way for the company to contend with new technologies from rivals like Amazon and Google. It’s also an effort to end a checkered spending pattern on acquisitions in the past decade.

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