Josh Payne, the company’s CEO, shared that Arkon Energy, a data center infrastructure company, has completed a $110 million private financing round to expand its operations.
The company launched in 2021 and started with a 5-megawatt facility in Australia. It has since grown to more than 130 megawatts and has spread to other countries and regions such as the United States and Europe.
“These sites appeal to both bitcoin miners and artificial intelligence (or) machine learning customers with very high power computing demands,” Payne said. According to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, 1 megawatt can power 400 to 900 homes per year.
Approximately $80 million will be used to acquire an additional 200 megawatts of capacity in new data centers in Ohio, North Carolina and Texas as part of the company’s plan to increase its total megawatts by 130% by mid-2024. This is in addition to Arkon’s existing 100-megawatt facility in Ohio, which it purchased in June, Payne said.
“The United States is an attractive market for us in many respects, largely due to tremendous domestic customer demand, a mature and robust energy sector with a variety of flexible and deregulated markets, political and regulatory stability, and the appeal of institutional investors,” Payne said. said. “The United States has a wealth of stranded and underutilized power generation assets that rely on some of the lowest-cost electricity sources in the world, many of which are renewable.”
Payne said the company’s U.S. data center portfolio is largely occupied by enterprise-level bitcoin mining companies. “We are essentially a landlord with basic infrastructure assets.”
Arkon’s business model focuses on strategically acquiring distressed data center assets around the world. “The current and future demand for data center capacity of all types that we see around the world, but especially in the United States, is unprecedented and enormous. “The customers we serve have energy-intensive platforms that require massive amounts of electrical infrastructure to be professionally managed and operated.”
The remaining $30 million will be used to develop an AI cloud service project at Arkon’s data center in Norway that will help serve the generative AI and large language model education markets. “Last year saw profound market momentum in demand for generative AI and big learning model applications,” he said.
The past year has seen “a very rapid increase in AI applications,” as well as the potential growth and adoption of Bitcoin in mainstream institutional markets, with major ETF approval looming, leaving specialized data centers like Arkon’s “poised to continue to grow exponentially.” ” said Payne.