Nvidia Approaches Apollo About Turning Old Telecom Buildings Into AI Data Centres

The plan would give Nvidia a quicker route to getting its chips installed and running at a time when large new data centre projects face mounting local resistance. Retrofitting existing telecom buildings still requires local permits, but far fewer than building from scratch, according to the report. The idea gained urgency after Tuesday's US midterm elections, in which Democratic candidates in states including Texas called for moratoriums on new data centres.

Most of the sites would come from Brightspeed, an Apollo-backed broadband provider that operates more than 130 buildings originally used to carry voice and data traffic and that is reported to be nearing bankruptcy. The portfolio has about 1 gigawatt of available power, according to the report. Nvidia sent Brightspeed a written proposal on Wednesday and has asked for more data and for site visits. It is not clear how many of the buildings Nvidia wants to convert.

Nvidia staff have discussed with suppliers the possibility of starting the retrofits with its Vera Rubin racks in the first quarter of 2027, The Information reported.

Inference Rather Than Training

Nvidia describes the proposed sites as an "inference network", meaning they would run models that have already been trained rather than host the giant clusters used to train new ones. Inference workloads can be spread across smaller facilities closer to users, which makes former telephone exchanges, often located in towns and cities and already wired for power and fibre, a plausible fit.

Who would buy or lease the computing capacity is unresolved. Potential users named in the report include cloud providers and AI developers such as SpaceX, Anthropic and OpenAI, though it is unclear whether Nvidia or Apollo has discussed the proposal with any of them.

The approach would extend Nvidia's role further into the infrastructure that sits around its chips. The company has typically left building and operating data centres to cloud providers, so-called neoclouds and their landlords, but those partners are now running into the same opposition the retrofit plan is designed to sidestep. Meta's president, Dina Powell McCormick, said on Thursday that the midterm results would make data centres harder to build.

The report came on a bruising day for the company's shares. Nvidia closed down about 9% on Thursday, its worst day since January 2025, as chipmakers led a broad sell-off driven by investor concern that a Democratic Congress and local ballot measures would curb AI infrastructure spending. The Nasdaq Composite fell 5.5%.

The next step is Brightspeed's response to Nvidia's written proposal and the site visits the chipmaker has requested, which would show how many of the 130-plus buildings can carry modern AI racks.