Who Owns Verne?

Verne Global was founded in 2012 to commercialize Iceland's combination of cheap geothermal and hydroelectric power, natural free cooling and mid-Atlantic fiber connectivity. Its first campus converted a former NATO air base site in Keflavik into a colocation facility aimed at high-performance computing customers priced out of London and Frankfurt markets.

Early customers came from research computing and financial services, drawn by 100 percent renewable power and total cost of ownership well below mainland Europe. BMW Group's high-performance computing cluster became a reference deployment, establishing Iceland as a credible location for power-hungry workloads.

D9 Infrastructure acquired the company in 2021 and used it as an expansion platform, absorbing Finnish provider Ficolo and London operator Volta Data Centres under the Verne name. When D9's own balance sheet deteriorated in 2023, it sold the platform to Ardian, completing in March 2024.

Under Ardian, Verne accelerated its AI positioning. It raised $1.1 billion in September 2025 and a further $433 million in SAFE funding in October 2025 to build out capacity, and in November 2025 signed a 15MW lease with AI cloud provider Nscale, deploying 4,600 Nvidia Blackwell Ultra GPUs at its Iceland campus through 2026. The campus now exceeds 140MW of IT capacity across 40 acres.

The Iceland thesis was built on a specific advantage: the former NATO airbase at Keflavik offered physical security, existing industrial infrastructure and immediate proximity to the submarine cables connecting Iceland to North America and Europe. The company converted military-era buildings into data halls that ran entirely on geothermal and hydroelectric power at prices far below European markets.

Early customers validated the pitch in high-performance computing and financial services, sectors where latency matters less than power economics. BMW was among the early enterprise names associated with the campus, using the facility for compute-intensive workloads, and the site hosted supercomputing deployments that traded on the renewable story.

Digital Colony, the digital infrastructure platform of Colony Capital, acquired the company in 2019 and funded the next phase: expansion of the Keflavik campus and a move into Finland, where facilities in Pori, Tampere and the Helsinki region added EU jurisdiction and lower latency to continental customers. The Finland build-out included both development and acquisition of existing facilities.

The 2023 rebrand from Verne Global to Verne signaled the shift from an Iceland story to a Nordic platform. When Ardian completed its acquisition in September 2024, reportedly valuing the business around 1.7 billion dollars, the buyer's stated thesis was exactly the one the founders had bet on: that AI's appetite for compute would make sustainable power the industry's scarcest asset.