ScienceShot: science and technology for the people who build the data-centre stack

Top stories

City lights of Europe at night, photographed from the International Space Station with a docked Soyuz spacecraft and solar panel in the foreground

How to Choose a Data Centre Location: Five Maps, Two Permanent

Siting a data centre means overlaying five constraint maps. Three are dissolving this decade. Two never will, and they point to a place we know.

Stefano Meroli · 17 Sep 2026

Top stories

Data CentersEnEfG Hearing: Six Statements on Germany’s Data-Centre Rules5 Oct 2026
Data CentersCosmic Rays and Silent Data Corruption in Data Centres3 Oct 2026
Data CentersEU Data Centre PUE 2025: What the First Figures Show2 Oct 2026
Data CentersEU Data Centre Minimum Performance Standards: What to Submit by 14 December1 Oct 2026

Live data and reference tools

Free, sourced and updated: the instruments behind our reporting.

Europe’s grid now0650 gCleanest Sweden (SE3) 22 gMost carbon-intensive Poland 632 gCarbon intensity of electricity, g CO₂e/kWh · Updated 21:49 CESTOpen the live grid →

70 days: EU consultation closesRegulation tracker Every European data-centre energy rule, its threshold and its next date.30 countries rankedSiting cost map Rank 30 European countries by power cost and emissions for your load.10,701 power plantsEnergy map Every power plant of 50 MW or more in Europe, searchable by fuel and capacity.500 kW reporting thresholdEED reporting guide What a site over 500 kW reports to the EU, and by when.

Latest

Semiconductors & Electronics

CubeSats deployed in orbit, the radiation environment where 2D semiconductors outlast silicon

MoS2 Radio Survives Nine Months in Orbit: What It Shows

A 2026 orbital MoS2 radio experiment ran for nine months. Its measured error rate supports a promising result, with mission qualification still ahead.

Inside a ball grid array chip package: copper routing traces in the organic substrate fan out from the central die area

Intel Glass Core Substrate: Why It’s Not Shipping

3D chip stacking thermal limit illustration of silicon layers

3D Chip Stacking’s Thermal Limit Splits Cache From Cores

Optoelectronics for High Energy Experiments: Evolution and Emerging Capabilities

Optoelectronics for High Energy Experiments: Evolution and Emerging Capabilities

A particle track passes through a translucent polycrystalline diamond sensor bump-bonded to a pixel readout chip; the pixels beneath the track light up red.

The Future of Particle Detection: Diamond Pixel Sensors

Rules clock

Days to the dates European data-centre operators plan around.

Regulation tracker →Every rule and its status

70daysEU consultation closesMinimum performance standards for data centres · 14 Dec 2026
88daysGermany: 100% renewable powerEnEfG, law in force; a bill would move it to 2030 · 1 Jan 2027
177daysGerman register report dueEnEfG annual data-centre report · 31 Mar 2027
222daysEU data-centre report dueEED Article 12, sites from 500 kW IT · 15 May 2027

Connectivity

Co-packaged optics silicon photonics switch powering an AI data center

Co-Packaged Optics Is Killing the Pluggable Transceiver

Everyone is cheering co-packaged optics for saving power. They are missing the real story: the pluggable transceiver, the most-swapped part in any AI data center, is being quietly executed.

An in-floor patch panel in a computer room, with a fibre connector panel above rows of labelled red, green and blue patch cables

Fibre Optic Infrastructure for Data Centres: Optics, Cabling and Testing

Bundles of yellow fibre patch cables plugged into an optical patch panel at the AMS-IX Internet exchange in Amsterdam

Meet-Me-Rooms: The Hidden Rooms Where the Internet Actually Connects

A coiled purple Ethernet cable with its jacket cut back to expose the twisted pairs of copper wires

Copper or Fiber: The Truth About Network Speed and Bandwidth

Hollow-Core-Preform

Hollow Core Fibres: How Novel Fibres Smashed Loss Records Through Air Guidance

Live · 48 hours

Europe’s grid, hour by hour

One stripe per hour and market: the last day measured, the next one forecast. Flexible data-centre load belongs in the green and the blue.

Sweden (SE3)23

Norway (NO2)28

Finland36

Switzerland38

France46

Denmark (DK1)70

United Kingdom192

Spain228

Austria251

Belgium396

Italy (North)422

Germany465

Netherlands549

Poland632

Open the live grid →

Data Centers

A high-density compute rack, the kind whose power draw pushed AI data centres from 54V busbars to 800V DC

800V DC Power Is Solving AI Racks’ Copper Crisis

800V DC is replacing 54V busbars in AI racks because 1MW at 54V means about 18,500 amps. How much copper it saves depends on the baseline: the widely quoted 45%…

Library shelves filled with books: curation, not raw supply, is what keeps a corpus useful

AI Model Collapse Is a Curation Failure

A data centre hall in Virginia, the state at the centre of American data-centre opposition

Data Center Opposition Is Now America’s Real AI Bottleneck

A nuclear power plant cooling tower, the generation data centres are contracting directly rather than queueing for grid capacity

Equinix’s Nuclear Power Agreements: What Each One Secures

High-voltage transmission towers, the capacity ordinary ratepayers are funding for data centres that may never be built

Phantom Data Center Power Demand Is Raising Your Bill

Software & AI

An Enigma cipher machine: transforming data before it leaves your hands is the oldest version of mask-then-send

PII Masking AI Agent: The New Privacy Default

PII masking AI agent design is quietly becoming standard — six unrelated vendors converged on mask-then-send without comparing notes.

A library card catalog, the original unified memory: every record indexed, retrievable and removable

Claude Unified Memory Is a Trust Play, Not a Feature

Traders on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, the job AI trading agents are now doing unsupervised

AI Trading Agents Are Losing Real Money Fast

NASA Mission Control during Apollo 11, a closed loop of acting and watching the result

Claude Code Built-In Browser Closes the QA Loop

DDR memory modules: agent memory is a cost and latency problem, not an emotional one

AI Agent Memory Is About Cost, Not Feelings