Investment firm Digital Transformation Capital Partners (DTCP) has launched a new data center platform.
GreenScale, launched this week, is planning to deploy 170MW of capacity across sites in Derry, Northern Ireland, and Donegal, Republic of Ireland. The company also has further development plans for an additional 300MW capacity in the Nordics, but didn’t reveal details.
The company is led by Dan Thomas, who has taken on the role of CEO. He joins from AtlasEdge, where he had been SVP of sales since 2021, and was previously at InterXion for a decade.
Thomas said: “GreenScale’s vision is to design, build, and operate over 1GW of capacity across Europe, enabling the industry transformation needed to provide AI, cloud, and high-performance compute environments to our customers in a sustainable way.”
He continued: “GreenScale’s data centers will leverage alternative energy sources and contribute to increased renewable developments in the market that will benefit local communities. We have already proven this in Northern Ireland, where we have started collaborating with local utility companies, governments, and renewable energy providers to ensure a robust power supply to the site. Added to this is our active involvement in the future development of new alternative offshore and onshore energy sources that will help improve the local grid overall.”
GreenScale’s two Irish sites have been inherited from Atlantic Hub, a data center developer acquired by DTCP last month. Terms of the investment were not shared.
Established in 2018, Atlantic Hub recently received planning permission for its debut campus in Derry, Northern Ireland. At full build-out, the 100MW, 12-hectare site at the Foyle Port Innovation Park in Maydown could total four buildings and 1 million sq ft (93,000 sqm) of technical space. The company is also working on a campus in County Donegal, Ireland. The 100MW campus is planned at the Letterkenny Technology Park.
Timelines for development at the Irish or Nordic sites haven't been shared. The company told DCD it is yet to announce any secured customers, but discussions are ongoing.
Initially investing $1 billion, the company aims to deliver 1GW of capacity; it will offer turnkey deployments, which are fully designed, fitted, and operated by the company, as well as customized build-to-suit options. The company's own designs include air- and liquid-cooled options.
Joining Thomas is Ian Hammond as COO (previously at AtlasEdge and TomTom); Jean-Francois Berche as CTO (formerly Microsoft and AWS); Torsten Stuhl as chief development officer (previously Vantage Data Centers, Digital Realty, InterXion, and e-Shelter). Zahl Limbuwala, operating partner at DTCP, has been appointed chairman of GreenScale.
Limbuwala added: “The establishment of GreenScale recognizes the growing demand for sustainable large-scale data center capacity to satisfy the growth of Cloud and AI infrastructure. Our investment reflects DTCP’s confidence in the immense opportunities presented by these much-needed high-performance compute environments.”
DTCP was spun out of Deutsche Telekom in 2015 but retains close ties to the telco. Last month Deutsche Telekom said the company was planning to add five new hubs to its existing estate of 16 data centers through an initiative known as Project Xcalibur, which is the name GreenScale had been operating under prior to officially launching.
DTCP is an investment management firm with $3 billion in assets under management; DTCP Infra specializes in European digital infrastructure investments, including mobile towers, fiber networks, and data centers. The firm’s infrastructure investments include fiber companies Community Fibre, Cellnex Netherlands, Open Dutch Fiber, and German data center firm Maincubes.
Maincubes was founded in 2012 by German construction conglomerate Zech Group via its Art-Invest fund. DTCP acquired an undisclosed stake in the company in September 2022 and took a majority stake the following year.
Maincubes currently operates the FRA01 and FRA02 data centers in Frankfurt and another in Amsterdam in the Netherlands. The company has also announced plans for a third and fourth data center in Frankfurt and its first and second in Berlin.
Limbuwala told DCD that DTCP has decided to launch GreenScale separately from Maincubes, as opposed to expanding Maincubes into a pan-European platform, to allow the existing company to focus its expertise in Germany and create something from scratch with a different product and geographic focus.
Thomas added that all the sites GreenScale will be targeting will have "much more sizable" capacity over a five-to-ten-year period, beyond the boilerplate figures released today, which are aimed at being "day one" availability.
He said that GreenScale has been buying up powered land projects that are in early stage development with power and zoning largely secured in order to offer speed-to-market. He suggested that will be the company's strategy going forward.
