A row of racks filled with Google's AI hardware, known as TPUs. (Photo: Google)

Cloud computing platforms are quite frankly shifting the data center landscape — especially when it comes to giants like Amazon Web Services, Microsoft and Google.

Want to find out what three major cloud players were up to in 2018? We’ve curated our coverage of these companies at Data Center Frontier to highlight key developments at these three market leaders, including advances in artificial intelligence, liquid cooling, research on underwater data centers, a continued focus on Northern Virginia, and more:

Microsoft

Microsoft Accelerates its Brainwave AI With Intel FPGAs: At its Build conference, Microsoft said Project Brainwave, its deep learning acceleration platform harnessing Intel FPGAs, has been integrated with Azure Machine Learning for the cloud as well as edge computing.

Microsoft CEO Nadella: Underwater Data Centers Are the Future: Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella says the company’s underwater data center, known as Project Natick, could play a key role in Microsoft’s future infrastructure.

Google

Google Shifts to Liquid Cooling for AI Data Crunching: Google is shifting to liquid cooling for its latest version of its artificial intelligence hardware, as the heat generated by its new Tensor Processing Units (TPUs) has exceeded the limits of its previous data center cooling solutions.

Google Building Trans-Atlantic Cable to Boosts its Cloud in Northern Virginia: Google will build its own private subsea cable to manage data traffic between Europe and its huge cloud campuses in Northern Virginia, with potential benefits for Virginia Beach.

Amazon Web Services

Northstar Enters Virginia Data Center Market, with Fortune 20 Tenants: Northstar Commercial Partners has entered the Northern Virginia data center market, buying a prime land parcel in Loudoun County to build a data center campus for one of the world’s largest companies.

Settlement Ends Dispute Over Haymarket Data Center Power Lines: Dominion Virginia Power and several community groups have reached an agreement that clears the way for new power lines to support a data center project in Haymarket, Virginia, ending a long-running dispute.