Tesla announces launch of universal AI fully autonomous driving solution
1077
English
English
Swedish EcoDataCenter (EDC) recently announced a successful financing of US$478 million (approximately 450 million euros) to meet the growing demand for artificial intelligence (AI) computing. The financing was provided by anonymous institutional investors, and EDC plans to use the funding to develop more environmentally friendly technologies and build new data centers.
News of the financing came after an important EDC client, AI computing giant CoreWeave, submitted a U.S. initial public offering (IPO) application two days ago. So far, EDC's cumulative financing amount has reached 910 million euros (approximately US$966 million). Although Areim Holdings is EDC's parent company, it has not disclosed the company's valuation and said it does not consider splitting EDC. "We are focused on expanding the scale of EcoDataCenter and creating long-term value, and future IPOs are not what we actively pursue," said Robert Björk, investment manager at Areim.
EDC is committed to building more sustainable co-located data centers, allowing customers to bring their own servers and related hardware. According to research by the International Energy Agency (IEA), the power demand in large data centers is extremely large, usually above 100 megawatts (MW), with annual power consumption 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 demand for computing power, but also strives to promote industry change in an environmentally friendly way. “We are the first company in the world to build data centers with cross-laminated wood, and Microsoft is following this trend,” said EDC CEO Peter Michelson. EDC also uses renewable energy to power buildings and continues to explore more efficient cooling and operational materials.
EDC's customers include DeepL and some "large-scale" companies. Although these large companies will build their own data centers, they will also use co-located space provided by third parties such as EDC to balance the load. It is worth mentioning that EDC and CoreWeave have jointly built the first Blackwell cluster in the town of Faron, Sweden, to enhance European computing power.
The scale of this EDC financing highlights the value of data centers, especially in the context of the AI boom, co-locating data centers has become the key to customers' significant reduction in capital expenditures. Global investment in infrastructure is pouring into the data center industry, becoming a representative of the integration of emerging technologies and real estate.
