Ecodatacenter, a Swedish company that builds eco-friendly data centers used by leading computing providers to handle AI traffic, has increased nearly $5 billion (euros 450 million to be precise).
Equity funds from a group of unknown institutional investors will be used to continue developing new technologies for more “green” data centers and build their structure.
The news comes just two days after AI Compute Giant CoreWeave, one of EDC’s major clients, has filed for an IPO in the US.
EDC has currently raised 910 million euros ($966 million) to date. Arjim, the holding company that owns it, refused to say what the company’s valuation was. The company confirmed that EDC spin-outs were not on the card.
“We are focused on delivering long-term value supported by Ecodatacenter’s scaling and strong investors’ support,” said Robert Björk, investment manager at AREIM, and board member Ecodatacenter. “While continuing to assess the company’s strategic opportunities, including potential future funding options, the IPO is not actively pursuing at this stage.”
The focus of Ecodatacenter has been to make data centers more sustainable, particularly colocation spaces where customers bring in their own servers and some or all of their associated hardware. It’s a timely effort. Research from the International Energy Agency shows how large Power Hungry data centers are.
The IEA has discovered that these data centers have more than 100 MW of electricity demand. The IEA also estimates that data centers collectively account for 1% of global electricity consumption.
In that context, EDC is not only remarkable for meeting the seemingly insatiable demand for computing power, but also for trying to do it in an environmentally friendly way.
“We were the first company in the world to start building what we call crosslinkers,” EDC CEO Peter Michaelson said in an interview. “Microsoft is following me now.”
EDC also continues to work on new approaches and materials for more efficient cooling and operation by using renewable energy to move buildings.
Other Ecodatacenter customers include Deepl and what is called “Hyperscalers.” The latter companies have built their own data centers, but they are burdened with the balance by taking up space in things built by third parties like EDC.
Although there are many customers spread outside of technology such as BMW, EDC is perhaps best known as a CoreWeave partner. He is also a well-known hosting provider for the project in collaboration with CoreWeave and Nvidia, and is designed to build the first Blackwell cluster in Europe in the Swedish town, bringing more computing power to Europe.
The scale of EDC’s funding highlights that valuable data centers, particularly colocation centers that offset key CAPEX spendings by customers, have become the current hype cycle for AI.
It’s a global spike. Most notably, in January the US announced Stargate, where the US kicked off to build a mega-AI data center with support from Openai, Softbank and others. (This plan is only at this point. It was announced a few days after Trump took office, and not only helped him to make the ideal photo of the new administration more tech-friendly, but also actively return home.)
“Given the real estate infrastructure is becoming more technology-oriented now, it’s going to be flooded with more infrastructure-type capital in the data center space,” Michelson said.
That real estate anchor can provide clues as to how current administrations, particularly President Trump, whose professional life began in real estate, was sold in his big data center efforts.
Source link