Data Center News

Ardian purchases data center company Verne Global

Verne Global

French private equity firm Ardian just purchased data center company Verne Global from Digital 9 Infrastructure. D9 bought Verne for $320 million in 2021 and has since then acquired and merged Finnish data center firm Ficolo and London’s Volta Data Centres into the Verne brand. However, D9 had...

OpenAI hires Todd Underwood to head new SRE team

Google

OpenAI has hired Google’s Todd Underwood to head a new Site Reliability Engineering team focused on research and training workloads as it already has a functional team for the applied side working on inference and API products. The SRE concept originally started at Google, but has since spread...

European Commission reveals plans to upgrade power grids

Europe

The European Commission is currently drafting a plan to invest about €584 billion to upgrade the region's power grids. With this investment, countries will be able to handle varied renewable energy loads, modernize transmission, and improve cyber security. The draft document posted by Reuters ...

EcoDataCeter to double capacity of Swedish data center

EcoDataCenter (EcoDC AB)

EcoDataCenter has revealed plans to expand its main data center and more than double its current capacity. The first phase of the EcoDataCenter 1 expansion is expected to be completed by the third quarter of 2024, and the full build out by second quarter of 2025. The expansion will bring the t...

OpenAI hires Google’s Richard Ho to head new hardware department

Google

OpenAI has hired Google’s Richard Ho as the head of hardware to lead the new division to help “influence roadmaps for hardware partners for data center networks, racks, and buildings.” Ho had spent about 9 years at Google, leading one of the company’s Cloud Tensor Processing Units projects, wi...

Nexspace unveils new data center facility in Heidelberg, Germany

nexspace: Heidelberg

New colocation operator Nexspace recently unveiled its first facility in the Heidelberg Innovation Park (HIP) in Germany this month. The three-story site offers 2MW of IT load across 4,000 square meters, which is reportedly expandable to 8,000 square meters in the future.  Germany’s Data C...

Rest Super invests in Quinbrook data center

Australia

Australian superannuation fund Rest Super announced this week that it is investing  $656 million in a data center and battery storage project from Quinbrook Infrastructure Partners in Brisbane. This investment will expose it to several assets, including solar and battery projects, green data s...

Gigas to expand footprint in Lisbon

Spain

Spanish cloud company Gigas has planned to invest €3 million this year in its Oni data center in Lisbon, Portugal. The company purchased Portuguese telco Oni from MásMóvil in November 2020 for €40 million and plans to double the number of data rooms the 2,000 square meters site offers to ten, ...

Telkcom considers selling Swifnet tower division

South Africa

South African telco Telkom, which spun off its telecom towers and mast into a separate division in 2021, is looking to sell the assets to unlock more value in the business. The operator is now in exclusive negotiations over selling its masts and towers business, Swiftnet. The company mentioned...

Ericsson issues its first-ever green bond

Europe

Swedish network vendor Telco OEM Ericsson announced that it has issued its first-ever green bond, a  €500 million bond with a maturity of four-and-a-half years issued under Ericsson's Euro Medium Term Note Program (EMTN). Carl Mellander, Ericsson’s CFO said, “The successful placement of this g...

Graphcore discontinues China business, pulls out of the country

China

British chipmaker Graphcore has announced that it will pull out of China in the face of US export controls. The chipmaker is now letting go of most of its staff in China and discontinuing business there. This is another setback to the company, which is already struggling as it revealed in Octo...

Germany’s Hauck Aufhäuser Lamp Privatbank to launch new data center fund

Germany / Deutschland

Germany’s Hauck Aufhäuser Lamp Privatbank announced that its real estate investment management unit is launching a €300 million fund for institutional investors, targeting data centers in major German cities. This is the company’s first-ever data center-focused fund.  Patrick Brinker, head of ...

Microsoft to expand its footprint in Canada

Microsoft Azure

Microsoft this week announced that it will be expanding its footprint in Canada with multiple new data centers with an investment of US$500 million to expand its cloud computing and AI infrastructure in Quebec over the next two years. The company notes that this investment will increase its lo...

NextDC commences construction on Darwin data center

NEXTDC

Two years after sharing initial plans, NextDC has finally begun construction at its D1  8MW data center in Australia's Northern Territory in Darwin. The site located close to the Charles Darwin University CBD campus is  being constructed by Kapitol Group NT and is expected to create around 200...

Sam Altman returns as OpenAI’s CEO, with new board

Microsoft Azure

Sam Altman, who was suddenly fired by the board has “reached an agreement in principle” to return as CEO of OpenAI as nearly all of OpenAI’s employees threatened to leave the company if the board did not reverse its decision.  Twitch co-founder Emmett Shear, who was appointed as interim CEO ai...

Netrality secures $380 million SLL for upgrade efforts

Netrality Properties

US data center operator Netrality has secured a $380 million sustainability-linked loan (SLL) to help make its data halls more energy efficient. The loan facility will be paid in US data center operator Netrality has secured a $380 million sustainability-linked loan (SLL) to help make its data...

Scala Data Centers makes $215m green-tied issuance

Scala Data Centers

Latin America data center provider Scala Data Centers has issued $215 million of green debentures, marking the second largest green-tied issuance in the Brazil data center sector. The funds will be used to construct hyperscale data centers which will have an annual PUE of less than 1.45, with ...

Norwegian mayor debunks claim that Google new facility will need 860MW

Google

Mayor of the Skien municipality, Marius Roheim Aarvold has said claims that Google’s upcoming data center campus in Norway will require 860MW of power to support its planned data center campus in Gromstul, Skien municipality.are false. Local press had reported that Microsoft formerly applied f...

Open Access Data Centers to expand Johannesburg facility

Johannesburg

Pan-African operator Open Access Data Centers (OADC) plans to expand its data center in Johannesburg, South Africa, and has reportedly begun work on phase two expansion of its Isando facility, which is expected to be complete in Q1 2024, adding 4MW and 600 racks.  Darren Bedford, group chief b...

OpenAI employees threaten to quit if the board doesn’t resign and reinstate Sam Altman

Over 500 employees at artificial intelligence company OpenAI have threatened to quit unless the board resigns and ousted CEO Sam Altman is reinstated. A total of 505 staffers have mentioned that they will be crossing over to Microsoft, which has now hired Altman, cofounder Greg Brockman, and s...