Verne Global acquired by Digital 9 Infrastructure for £231 million

London-based data centre provider Verne Global has been acquired by crosstown investment trust Digital 9 Infrastructure in a deal valued at approximately £231 million.

Founded in 2007, Verne Global has raised $125 million over the course of 2 rounds and operates a 40-acre data campus in Keflavik, Iceland. The company’s focus is on providing rock-solid, high-intensity computing workloads, i.e. those found in AI, machine learning, high-performance computing (HPC) and supercomputing.

With geothermal and hydro being Iceland's two primary sources of power, this gives Verne’s data campus a 100% renewable energy rating. And, it should go without saying, the Icelandic climate provides a natural source of cooling this data centre, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year.

The newly established Digital 9 Infrastructure (D9) investment trust (with Triple Point Investment acting as investment manager), is focused on UN Sustainable Development Goal 9, to “build resilient infrastructure, promote inclusive and sustainable industrialization and foster innovation”. The acquisition falls directly in line with the trust’s ambition to decarbonise digital infrastructure by increasing access to data centres where clean energy is to be found in abundance.

“Data centres form a key part of the digital infrastructure backbone. Verne Global’s existing Icelandic based data centre assets represent some of the cleanest, lowest carbon footprint data centres, globally. This is another key step to support decarbonising the data centre industry. For society to meet key decarbonisation goals, we need to look for ways to shift energy consumptive activities to areas of surplus renewable energy,” commented Triple Point’s Thor Johnsen. “The digital infrastructure industry has an increasing energy footprint, particularly data centres, which need to become more energy-efficient and green. However, as an industry, we should not expect to just rely on carbon offsets in markets that are already struggling to meet carbon targets, but we need to attract data centre demand to areas where there are robust sources of renewable power."