Arkon Energya data center infrastructure company, has closed a $110 million private funding round to expand its operations, the company’s CEO Josh Payne shared exclusively with TechCrunch.
The round was led by Bluesky Capital Management and included participation from Kestrel 0x1 and Nural Capital.
The company launched in 2021 and started with a 5 megawatt site in Australia. It has since grown to over 130 megawatts and expanded to other countries and regions such as the US and Europe.
“These sites target both bitcoin miners and artificial intelligence [or] machine learning customers that have very high computing power requirements,” Payne said. For the environment, 1 megawatt can power 400 to 900 homes a year, according to Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
About $80 million will be used to acquire an additional 200 megawatts of capacity at new data centers in Ohio, North Carolina and Texas as part of its plan to increase the company’s total megawatts by 130% by mid-2024. That’s in addition to of Arkon’s existing 100-megawatt facility in Ohio that it purchased in June, Payne noted.
“The US is an attractive market for us in many ways, not least because of huge domestic customer demand, a mature and robust energy industry with many flexible and deregulated markets, political and regulatory stability and attractiveness to institutional investors,” Payne said. “The U.S. has a wealth of dormant, underutilized power generation assets connected to some of the cheapest sources of electricity in the world, many of which are renewable.”
The company’s U.S. data center portfolio is largely occupied by institutional-level bitcoin mining companies, Payne said. “We are essentially an owner that owns the underlying infrastructure assets.”
Arkon’s business model focuses on the strategic acquisition of distressed data center assets around the world. “The current and future demand for data center capacity of all types that we are seeing globally, but particularly in the US, is unprecedented and monumental. The customers we serve have energy-intensive platforms that require a huge amount of electrical infrastructure to be professionally managed and operated.”
The remaining $30 million will be used to develop an AI cloud services project in Arkon’s data center in Norway to help provide AI services and large language model training markets. “Over the last year, there has been a profound market acceleration in demand for productive AI applications and large learning models,” he said.
However, there is a lack of specialized physical infrastructure to power the computers and servers behind most of these products. Arkon aims to fill this gap by providing the underlying infrastructure layer on which the AI domain is built.
The past year has seen a “meteor rise in AI applications,” as well as potential growth and adoption of bitcoin in mainstream institutional markets as ETF approval approaches, making specialized data centers like Arkon’s “poised to continue to scale exponentially. Payne said.
