Northern Data and Core42, a G42 company, have signed an agreement to establish sovereign European AI cloud capacity.

Under the partnership, UAE-based Core42 will have access to up to 10,000 GPUs from Northern Data's Taiga Cloud business.

Reports that the two companies were exploring some kind of deal first emerged towards the end of July.

It has not been shared which data centers the GPUs will be hosted in, but Taiga has capacity at Ardent Data Centers facilities - another Northern Data company - in Boden, Sweden, and Lefdal and Kristiansand, Norway. The Lefdal site is hosted by Lefdal Mine, and Kristiansand by Bulk. The company says it also has colocation capacity in the UK and Portugal, while its website also lists a 6MW site in Amsterdam, the Netherlands.

According to Northern Data, the partnership has also been enabled by Taiga's technology upgrade through the April deal with Gcore, which enabled Taiga to offer GPU infrastructure on demand.

Aroosh Thillainathan, Northern Data Group founder and CEO, said of the deal: “Core42 and Northern Data are joining forces to shape the future of AI. Together, we will pioneer next-generation infrastructure, go-to-market strategies, and groundbreaking AI products. Our partnership is driven by a shared mission: to build sovereign, high-performance AI infrastructure that meets the world’s surging demand for compute power and unlocks transformative possibilities for humanity.”

Core42 is G42's business focused on sovereign cloud and AI infrastructure, and has launched similar sovereign AI infrastructure offers in other countries, including supercomputers in the UAE and partnerships in France and Italy.

Edmondo Orlotti, Core42's chief growth officer, said: “Our partnership with Northern Data strengthens Core42’s ability to deliver sovereign AI infrastructure at scale. By integrating Taiga Cloud’s powerful GPU capacity with our global deployment experience, we can respond faster to rising demand and accelerate AI adoption across industries. This collaboration reflects our strategy of aggregation, combining internally deployed capacity with access to trusted GPU partners to scale rapidly and reliably.”

Abu Dhabi's G42 is chaired and majority owned by the brother of the UAE’s president, Tahnoun bin Zayed Al Nahyan. Tahnoun is the nation's national security adviser and chair of Stargate-backer MGX. G42 is also an investor in regional data center operator Khazna.

Northern Data was founded as Northern Bitcoin AG in Germany in 2009 and branded itself as a 'green' Bitcoin mining company. In 2020, Northern Bitcoin was officially renamed Northern Data Group and moved its focus to HPC.

The company had three businesses: Ardent Data Centers, Taiga Cloud, and Peak Mining, but sold the latter this month to Elektron Energy for $235m in a deal expected to close later this year.

Meanwhile, Rumble Inc., an 'alt-tech' video platform and cloud services provider that promises not to cancel users, is looking to buy the rest of Northern Data.

Previous reports suggested Northern was looking at initial public offerings (IPOs) for both Taiga and Arden, potentially targeting a $10-16 billion valuation.