EcoDataCenter, a Swedish company that builds eco-friendly data centers used by major compute providers to handle their AI traffic, has raised nearly half a billion dollars — $478 million (€450 million) to be exact — in anticipation of more demand.
The equity funding, which is coming from a group of unnamed institutional investors, will be used to continue developing new technologies for more “green” data centers and to build those structures.
The news comes just two days after one of EDC’s major customers, the AI compute giant CoreWeave, filed for an IPO in the United States.
EDC has now raised €910 million ($966 million) in equity to date. Areim, the holding company that owns it, declined to say what the company’s valuation is. The company did confirm that spinning out EDC is not on the cards.
“We are focused on scaling EcoDataCenter and delivering long-term value, supported by the strong backing of our investors,” said Robert Björk , an investment manager for Areim, and board member EcoDataCenter. “While we continuously evaluate strategic opportunities for the company, including potential future financing options, an IPO is not something we are actively pursuing at this stage.”
EcoDataCenter’s focus has been to build data centers — specifically, colocation spaces where customers bring in some or all of their own servers and related hardware — that are more sustainable. It’s a timely effort: research from the International Energy Agency has shown how power hungry large data centers can be.
The IEA has found that these data centers have power demands of 100 MW or more, “with an annual electricity consumption equivalent to the electricity demand from around 350,000 to 400,000 electric cars.” The IEA also estimated that data centers collectively account for 1% of all global electricity consumption.
In that context, EDC is notable for not just helping to meet the seemingly insatiable demand for compute capacity, but for trying to do that in an eco-friendly manner — one that is now influencing others.
“We were the first company in the world to start building in what’s called cross-laminated timber,” said Peter Michelson EDC’s CEO, in an interview. “Now, Microsoft is following.” EDC also uses renewable energy to power its buildings, and continues to work on new approaches and materials for more efficient cooling and operations.
EcoDataCenter’s other customers include DeepL and the so-called “hyperscalers.” The latter companies do build their own data centers, but they also load balance by taking space in those built by third parties, like EDC.
While it has a number of customers that extend outside of tech such as BMW, EDC is perhaps best known as the partner of CoreWeave. It’s also the prominent hosting provider for a project in collaboration with CoreWeave and Nvidia to build the first Blackwell cluster in Europe, in the Swedish town of Falun, designed to bring more compute capacity to Europe.
The size of EDC’s fundraise highlights how valuable data centers — especially colocation centers that offset major capex spend for its customers — have become in the current hype cycle for AI.
That is a global surge. Most notably, the U.S. in January announced Stargate, a $500 billion project that the U.S. kicked off with support from OpenAI, SoftBank and others to build mega AI data centers. (The plan is only that at this point: announced days after Trump took office, it served to drive home an idealized picture of the new administration as not just tech-friendly, but aggressively so.)
“There’s a lot of infrastructure-type capital flooding into the data center space, given that it’s real estate infrastructure now becoming more tech oriented,” said Michelson.
That real estate anchor could provide a clue into how the current administration, and particularly President Trump — whose professional life started in real estate — were sold on their own big data center effort.