Who Owns atNorth?

The business began in 2009 as Thor Data Center, founded by Jon Viggo Gunnarsson and partners in Hafnarfjordur, south of Reykjavik. The concept was new: locate compute in Iceland to exploit geothermal and hydro power plus free air cooling. Opera Software became an anchor client in 2010, moving Opera Mini traffic for more than 20 million users through the facility.

Icelandic IT company Skyrr acquired Thor Data Center in 2011 and merged into Advania in 2012, folding the data centers into a Nordic IT services group. The facilities grew under Advania's data center unit, adding the Mjolnir site in Reykjanesbaer.

In December 2020 the unit rebranded as atNorth and became a standalone platform under CEO Eyjolfur Magnus Kristinsson. Partners Group acquired the company in a deal announced in late 2021 and completed in 2022, beginning a rapid buildout.

Under Partners Group, atNorth expanded from Iceland into Sweden, Finland, Denmark and Norway, opening sites including SWE01 in Stockholm, multiple Finnish campuses and Denmark's first facilities, while acquiring HPC provider Gompute in 2023. Contracted EBITDA grew fourteen-fold over four years as AI demand filled new halls.

In February 2026 Partners Group agreed to sell atNorth to CPP Investments and Equinix at a $4 billion enterprise value, completing in September 2026 with Partners Group rolling into a 10 percent secondaries stake. The company enters its next phase with more than 1.5GW of secured power and sites under development in Sweden, Finland, Norway and Denmark.

Partners Group, the Swiss private markets firm, acquired the business in 2018 and used it as the platform for a Nordic consolidation strategy. Under its ownership the company combined its Icelandic operations with additional facilities, rebranded from Thor DC to atNorth in 2020 and began expanding across the region: a Stockholm campus, sites in Finland and a Copenhagen facility in Denmark.

The expansion targeted the same market logic as peers: renewable-powered Nordic facilities serving customers under increasing pressure to document low-carbon compute. The Stockholm site added a signature sustainability feature in the form of heat reuse, piping waste heat from servers into the district heating network operated with local utility partners.

By 2025 atNorth ran the broadest Nordic footprint of the independent operators, with campuses in four countries serving hyperscale tenants, research institutions and enterprises, and a growing share of AI and HPC customers whose power densities matched its design specifications.

The 2026 transaction confirmed the market's revaluation of that position. CPP Investments and Equinix jointly acquired majority control from Partners Group in a deal reportedly valuing the company at over 4 billion dollars, with Partners Group retaining a minority stake. The Equinix involvement was the strategic signal: the world's largest data center company choosing to enter the Nordic market through partnership rather than its own builds validated the region's arrival as core AI infrastructure.