Who Owns Borealis Data Center?

Borealis Data Center was founded in 2014 in Iceland, entering a market pioneered by Verne: colocation built on the country's geothermal and hydroelectric power and cold-climate free cooling. Its strategy was smaller, efficient campuses rather than a single mega-site.

The first facility opened at Fitjar in Reykjanesbaer in 2018, offering roughly 8MW. Luxembourg-based Etix Everywhere acquired the company the same year and funded its second campus at Blonduos in northern Iceland, which opened in 2019 with about 37MW of capacity on a modular build completed in nine months.

Vauban Infrastructure Partners bought its majority stake in July 2021, and expansion accelerated. A new HPC building added 12MW at Blonduos in 2022, the same year Borealis acquired a data center outside Reykjavik, giving it a presence in the capital's connectivity hub.

International expansion followed in 2024, when Borealis acquired a campus in Kajaani, central Finland, on the Renforsin Ranta business park, a former UPM paper mill site previously operated by Finnish provider Herman IT. The deal took the platform to four campuses across two countries.

In February 2025 the company secured a $148 million financing package, a $135 million term loan from Infranity plus $13 million in revolving facilities from Arion Bank, to fund further expansion in both markets. Blonduos data halls also became the first OCP Ready certified facilities in Iceland, approved to host high-density AI hardware, and the company has partnered with Fluidstack, Nvidia and Dell on exascale GPU cluster deployments.

The company's first facilities opened in Blondos in northern Iceland and Kopavogur in the Reykjavik area, chosen to pair Iceland's hydroelectric and geothermal power with connectivity into the submarine cable systems linking the island to Europe and North America. The sites were designed for high-density racks from the outset, anticipating compute loads that conventional enterprise data centers struggle to cool.

BDC built its customer base in high-performance computing and energy-intensive workloads: scientific simulation, rendering, machine learning training and blockchain validation, the categories where power cost dominates total cost of ownership and latency is secondary. Its pitch to international customers was the combination Iceland uniquely offers: renewable power priced below European markets plus ambient temperatures cold enough for free-air cooling through most of the year.

Expansion into Finland added a second jurisdiction with EU membership and closer proximity to continental customers, part of the Nordic pattern established by rivals Verne and atNorth. A partnership with UK immersion-cooling specialist Deep Green deployed heat-reuse technology at the Kopavogur site, capturing compute waste heat for local use, a flagship sustainability deployment that became a reference case for the company's marketing.

Through 2024 to 2026 the AI buildout drove expansion of capacity at both campuses, positioning BDC in the suddenly crowded field of Nordic operators competing for the same GPU-dense workloads.