Digital 9 Infrastructure has acquired the Icelandic data center operator Verne Global for £231 million ($320m).
Verne operates a 24MW data center campus on a former NATO site near Keflavik, offering colocation and high-performance computing services. Another 8MW of capacity is currently under development.
Verne hosts some local colocation customers, but primarily hosts HPC workloads, with an increasing focus on artificial intelligence applications. "What Verne Global has achieved over the last decade is a fantastic accomplishment and is a great acknowledgment of the exceptional team that we have," Dominic Ward, CEO of Verne Global, said.
"We are hugely grateful for the support that we have had from our prior shareholders (Wellcome Trust, Stefnir, Novator Partners, and General Catalyst Partners) to this point."
The deal is D9's first data center investment, after the company launched earlier this year. Managed by Triple Point Investment Management, D9 raised £300 million ($422.9 million) in a March IPO, and then acquired submarine cable owner Aqua Comms for £160 million ($215m). In June, it raised another £175 million ($246.7m).
"Data centers form a key part of the digital infrastructure backbone," Thor Johnsen, head of digital infrastructure at Triple Point, said.
"Verne Global’s existing Icelandic based data center assets represent some of the cleanest, lowest carbon footprint data centers, globally."
D9 plans another equity raise, and said that it had identified a further six data center investments with an aggregate value of around £200m ($277m), as well as another £470m ($650m) in other digital infrastructure deals.