Ardent Data Centers, a Northern Data Group company, progresses international data center acquisition strategy

• €110 million investment strategy to accelerate Ardent's ability to provide co-location services across Europe and the United States
• Expansion focussed on meeting demand for high-performance computing solutions for Generative AI and other emerging technologies
• Letters of Intent in place for two sites in the United States and preferred bidder status for a key site in the United Kingdom
• Additional sites across Europe and the United States being rapidly assessed to further accelerate expansion

FRANKFURT, Germany, Dec. 4, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- Ardent Data Centers, a Northern Data Group company and experts in data center design, build and management, today announces a €110 million investment strategy aimed at expanding its ability to provide co-location services for compute power, across Europe and the United States. Ardent has successfully agreed Letters of Intent (LOI) with two data center sites in the United States and is the preferred bidder on a key, strategic site in the United Kingdom. All three acquisitions are on track to be finalised by the end of Q1 2024, and form part of the overall investment strategy announced by the Northern Data Group.

These assets, once acquired, will form part of Ardent Data Centers expanding portfolio of next generation, high-density data centers, providing co-location services across Europe and the US. This capacity will address the surging demand for compute power needed for Generative AI applications and support Northern Data Group's strategy to capture the extensive opportunity in the global HPC market.

Ardent's data center environments will feature only the most efficient, purpose-built liquid cooling technology, which results in a lower Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) ratio than current market standards, allowing higher utilization and performance, at a lower cost. All new sites, once successfully added to Ardent's portfolio will be upgraded and retrofitted to meet this standard. This is in line with both Ardent's and Northern Data Group's wider commitment to providing infrastructure that ensures the environmental impact of compute-intensive processes is as light as possible.

As part of this strategic expansion, Ardent will support its sister company and anchor tenant, Taiga Cloud, providing more infrastructure for its current and future NVIDIA H100 deployments, starting with the upcoming expansion at Ardent Data Center's sites across Northern Europe. Ardent will also play a key role in Taiga's future expansion.

Corey Needles, Managing Director, Ardent Data Centers, commented:
"We are focused on building the most efficient, future-ready network of HPC co-location capacity in the market. These sites will represent an important next step in the expansion of our portfolio and are the most recent in a series of investments across strategic locations, with more to come. Powering the next-generation of HPC innovation is central to Northern Data Group's strategy, and scaling Ardent's data center portfolio is core to realizing this ambition."

Aroosh Thillainathan, Northern Data Group's Chief Executive Officer, commented:
"The rapid progress being made by the Ardent team will support Northern Data Group in providing the infrastructure required to fully capitalize on the vast opportunity in the HPC market. This is a further demonstration of our ability to relentlessly pursue growth opportunities, delivering value for stakeholders, and further establishes our position as a leader in this global industry."

About Ardent Data Centers:

Ardent Data Centers provide future-ready data centers which are purpose built to power the next generation of HPC. Part of the Northern Data Group, we house the industry's latest chips, combined with the latest liquid cooling systems to offer more power and better availability of on demand, compute-as-a-service infrastructure. With a proven track record of designing and operating high-performance data centers for over twenty five years, we're pioneering a new era of efficiency, delivering greater performance, density and availability.

About Northern Data Group:

Northern Data Group (ETR: NB2) is a provider of energy-efficient High Performance Computing (HPC) infrastructure to businesses and research institutions, utilising GPU- and ASIC-based solutions. Through our HPC infrastructure, we pioneer ambitious computing innovation that drives progress in the AI, ML and Generative AI industries. Our close collaboration with industry-leading manufacturers including Gigabyte, AMD, and NVIDIA is fundamental to the acceleration of innovation across sectors including life sciences, financial services and energy.