Former Global Switch executives will lead a new AI and cloud infrastructure company, Astor.

The new company, backed by London-based private market investment firm Margaux Platforms, will develop ready-to-build powered land and “agile” multi-tenant edge data center facilities.

According to the company's announcement, it will give compute providers access to “shovel-ready” pre-equipped with flexible reference designs for the “full spectrum” of modern computing workloads.

The data center projects will be high-efficiency colocation facilities specifically designed to “overcome the ‘last-mile’ obstacle of delivering IT capacity close to end-users in grid-constrained locations.”

More specifically, these will be metropolitan facilities with less than 100MW of capacity. The company will focus specifically on projects in developed OECD countries, commenting that Europe is “three to five years behind the US in AI and cloud penetration.”

“Cloud penetration, aging grid infrastructure and lengthening power connection queues increasingly pose a threat to Europe’s economic and digital sovereignty ambitions,” the announcement said.

The new business is led by former Global Switch global head of project delivery and engineering, Elliot Dittes, working with a number of former executives from Global Switch. Dittes will take the position of CEO.

Dittes commented: “The next phase of digital growth demands agile infrastructure that can be delivered quickly even as access to grid power becomes more constrained. Astor meets this challenge by unlocking capacity where it’s needed most with best-in-class design solutions that adapt to environments and evolving compute workloads for the world’s critical technologies of scale.”