France: Qarnot announces scale up

Jan 20, 2023 | Posted by MadalineDunn

French startup Qarnot, founded back in 2010, is looking to scale up its efforts with a €35 million financing round, which it said will help it expand its team, and take the business to the next level. It has also negotiated a €22.5 million credit line ($24 million) to finance its projects. Qarnot offers 'digital boilers' that heat water using waste heat from servers installed on-site.

It has also announced plans to install a number of data centers in Europe with its new QBx computing unit, which allows water to be heated up to above 60°C and has power ranging from 'hundreds of kW to a few MW'. Already it has piloted a data center in Finland with 100kW of compute.

"Having these new investors on board with us is an insurance to massively deploy our technologies and achieve our industrial-scale development. Leading cloud actors focus their strategy on sourcing renewable energy, mostly intermittent. This is only a partial and unsustainable solution to answer the booming IT infrastructure needs. We are committed to proving that tech performance may be combined with environmental concerns and digital sovereignty." said Paul Benoit, CEO and co-founder of Qarnot.

Alexandre Fleury, co-head of global market activities, Societe Generale, the venture capital unit of the European financial services group, said: "The partnership we signed with Qarnot, pioneer and leader in the reuse of data centers' waste heat, is part of the concrete initiatives that give shape to our ambition. After having had Qarnot as a provider to reduce our carbon footprint, we decided to go further by investing with Societe Generale Ventures in the company, to support their growth and scale up."

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