Swedish EcoDataCenter (EDC) recently announced that it has successfully completed a round of financing of up to US$478 million, which will mainly be used to meet the rapid growth of artificial intelligence (AI) computing power worldwide. The financing is provided by a group of anonymous institutional investors. EDC plans to invest these funds in the research and development of environmental protection technologies and the construction of new data centers to promote the sustainable development of the industry.
The release of this financing news coincided with the submission of an initial public offering (IPO) application in the United States, an important EDC client, CoreWeave. So far, EDC's cumulative total financing amount has reached 910 million euros. Although EDC's parent company Areim Holdings has not disclosed the company's specific valuation, it has made it clear that there is currently no plan to split EDC out. "Our current focus is to expand the scale of EcoDataCenter and create long-term value for it, and IPO is not our goal at this stage," said Robert Björk, investment manager at Areim.
EDC is committed to building a more sustainable co-located data center, allowing customers to bring their own servers and related hardware. According to research by the International Energy Agency (IEA), the electricity demand in large data centers is extremely large, usually exceeding 100 megawatts (MW), and their annual electricity consumption is equivalent to the total demand of 350,000 to 400,000 electric vehicles. The IEA estimates that data centers consume 1% of global electricity consumption.
Against this background, EDC not only meets the market's demand for computing power, but also promotes industry changes through environmental protection methods. "We are the world's first company to build data centers with cross-laminated wood, and Microsoft is following this trend," said EDC CEO Peter Michelson. In addition, EDC uses renewable energy to power data centers and continues to explore more efficient cooling technologies and operational materials.
EDC's customers include "large-scale" companies such as DeepL. Although these companies usually build their own data centers, they also balance the load with co-located space provided by third parties such as EDC. It is worth mentioning that EDC and CoreWeave have jointly built the first Blackwell cluster jointly developed with Nvidia in the town of Faron, Sweden to enhance European computing power.
The scale of EDC's financing highlights the importance of data centers in the AI boom. Co-located data centers have become the key to customers' capital expenditure reduction, and global investment in infrastructure is pouring into the data center industry, making it a representative area for the integration of emerging technologies and real estate.