Ardian's Nordic Data Center Platform Supports 'Sustainable Compute'

Ardian's very first investment in a data center company shows it is "quite convinced on the AI opportunity in Europe," says Pauline Thomson, Head of Data Science and a Managing Director at the $176 billion investment firm ⁠Ardian⁠.

In a Cool Vector interview, Thomson describers the thesis behind Ardian's $1.2 billion investment in Verne, an Iceland-based, green data center company with pan-Nordic growth plans. She notes that Iceland is the "only country in the world powered by 100% renewable energy." Verne's other operations in the UK and Finland are similarly focused on renewable power, as is an additional property under development in Norway. Thomson expects low-carbon nuclear energy to eventually play a big role in the Nordic data center platform.

Thomson explains that being a scaled provider of low-carbon, "sustainable compute" will give Verne an edge as a data center provider. "You need a lot of capital, because these are capital-hungry assets," she says. "And you need to scale the platforms to have sufficient importance on the market. If you want to attract customers that have a big demand for increased capacity, you need to show to them that you have a pipeline of projects, that you will be able to support them in their own growth. Otherwise you cannot become a partner of choice for these clients."

Although the firm is a major investor in infrastructure around the world, Ardian had not previously invested in a data center platform, because until Verne they could not find a company that was a good fit for Ardian's thesis. The firm is attracted to data centers because of their critical importance to society, low correlation to GDP, revenue visibility, as well as the need to deploy capital in order to have a successful commercial strategy.

Thomson says her firm expects the European data center market to grow by 27% CAGR over the next six years. 

Ardian has named former Digital Realty CEO William Stein as Non-Executive Chairman of Verne. 

Thomson explains Ardian's boots-on-the-ground edge in securing powered land across Europe, as well as in securing highly sought-after components necessary for data center development, prominently transformers. 

Verne data centers will specialize in high-performance computing (HPU), requiring a specific configuration of racks and cooling technology. Ardian anticipates that as "agentic AI" gains wider use, such as with autonomous vehicles, data center architecture may need to be reconfigured yet again to take on the added compute. 

As head of data science, Paris-based Thomson explains how her team has helped portfolio companies leverage their own data to capture greater efficiencies, including the creation of a resource called AirCarbon, helping airports analyze carbon emissions. 

"Our relationship to compute has fundamentally changed," says Thomson. "There is compute everywhere in whatever we do. That's not going away."

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