Thursday Roundup: Altibox, Element Critical, Verne, Google

One new subsea cable and three bits of data center news:

Altibox Carrier announced a new subsea cable project this week in the North Sea. They will be connecting Scarborough on the eastern coast of England with Esbjerg on the western coast of Denmark. The plans call for 16 fiber pairs on the 630km route and an RFS date sometime in 2028. The cable will be named ‘Verana’ after the English engineer Verana Holmes.

Element Critical is expanding its footprint in Houston. This week they began construction on a new 20,000 square foot data hall at the company’s Houston One campus. The project will add 4.5MW of new high density capacity by Q4 of next year and 10MW total when complete. Element Critical is seeing a capacity crunch in the Texas market, as demand outstrips even the massive investments we are seeing in new space around the world.

Verne has won a significant AI customer for its infrastructure in Iceland. Nscale has signed on for 15MW of capacity as it deploys some 4,600 NVIDIA Blackwell Ultra GPUs over the next year. The planned configuration will be 85% liquid-cooled and 15% air cooled. Verne operates data center infrastructure in Iceland, Finland, and the UK, and is expanding into France.

And Google has opened another new data center, this time in Winschoten, Groningen in the Netherlands. The facility will make its waste heat available for the community around it, and leverages solar painels on the roof and next generation air-cooling technology to limit water usage. Earlier this year they announced a power purchase agreement with Shell in support of an offshore wind farm.

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Categories: Artificial Intelligence · Datacenter · Undersea cables