The fresh capital doubles the total amount raised through the fund and will support the expansion of more environmentally-friendly data centres.
Swedish-based fund manager Areim has raised an additional €450m for its Nordic data centre fund that will finance the expansion of EcoDataCenter, a company owned by Areim that builds energy efficient, low emissions facilities.
The extra funding adds to a previous capital raise to bring the total raised for the Areim DC Fund to €900m.
The fund manager declined to name investors in the fund, citing confidentiality agreements, but said they included investors from both the Nordic region and further afield, representing a diversification of its investor base. The latest round was made on the same terms as the previous capital raise for the fund, which concluded in mid-2023 and targeted a 20%-plus net internal rate of return.
Including equity, debt, and bond capital, Areim has raised over €1.2bn for the data centre platform over the last two years. The ability to bring in extra capital partly reflects continuing investor appetite globally for the data centre sector, which is expected to expand rapidly to meet the processing demands created by fast-rising use of artificial intelligence (AI).
Robert Björk, fund manager of the Areim DC Fund, told Impact Investor the fresh capital would be used to further EcoDataCenter’s expansion.
“The successful conclusion of the capital raise to the Areim DC Fund means that we have enough capital to cover our needs going forward. At the same time, there is a lot going on in this space and we are now well-positioned and look to the future with great confidence,” he said.
Areim acquired EcoDataCenter in 2018 and transferred it to the Areim DC fund in 2023.
Power-hungry sector
EcoDataCenter builds data centres using energy efficient and low emissions technology, such as innovative cooling solutions to combat the impact of power-hungry data processing. It also sources all power for its facilities from renewable energy, and uses eco-friendly building materials, .
The company currently has four operational data centres in Sweden, with 41 megawatts (MW) of installed capacity and plans to construct four additional data centres that will add a further 48 MW.
Björk said investors were attracted by the company’s in-house operational and commercial expertise, against the backdrop of a growing market with strong fundamentals. He said the technical capabilities to deliver sustainable, future-proof data centres were another draw.
Impact investors are becoming increasingly interested in support for efficient, low carbon data centres given the environmental dangers posed by the potentially huge power requirements of the sector, as it caters to the growing needs of AI processing.
Research from Goldman Sachs in 2024 concluded that an AI-driven ChatGPT query needs nearly 10 times as much electricity to process than a Google search and that the increased power demand from AI could drive global electricity usage by data centres up 160% by 2030. If that happened, data centres could account for 3-4% of overall power consumption by then, compared to around 1-2% now – and this in turn could lead to a doubling of carbon emissions caused by data centre demand between 2022 and 2030.
