Tuesday Roundup: CoreWeave, Telenor, GlobalConnect, Equinix, Groq

Two inorganic moves, and two organic ones, with three from the same part of the world.

CoreWeave will be buying Core Scientific in an all stock transaction. The deal, which is valued at $9B or so, will give CoreWeave 1.3GW of capacity across Core Scientific’s US data center footprint. The two have been working together for some time, and this was not CoreWeave’s first bid. CoreWeave took its AI hyperscaler model public back in march. This M&A is expected to close sometime in Q4.

In a bit of fiber M&A news in Scandinavia, Telenor is buying GlobalConnect’s B2C business. The transaction will transfer some 140K customers to Telenor’s footprint, adding scale to the incumbent’s last mile reach. Meanwhile, GlobalConnect continues to shift its business toward wholesale rather than consumer.

And on that note, GlobalConnect recently unveiled plans for a new subsea cable in the Baltic Sea. The new system will connect Sweden and Finland via Åland and will cost about €14M. About 150km will be underwater, while 365km will be on upgraded terrestrial routes. GlboalConnect anticipates 400% more capacity as compared to their existing cable.

And also in the same part of the world, Groq has expanded its AI inference footprint into Europe, and specifically Finland. They have leased space in one of Equinix’s five Helsinki data centers. They hope to leverage the region’s free cooling and sustainable energy depth while lowering latency to European customers. Groq’s existing presence touches the US, Canada, and Saudi Arabia.

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Categories: Artificial Intelligence · Datacenter · Fiber Networks · Mergers and Acquisitions · Undersea cables