Akron EnergyThe data center infrastructure company has closed a $110 million private financing round to expand its operations, CEO Josh Payne shared exclusively with TechCrunch.
The round was led by Bluesky Capital Management and included participation from Kestrel 0x1, Nural Capital and Florence Capital.
The company launched in 2021 and started with a 5MW site in Australia. It has since grown to over 130 MW and expanded into other countries and regions such as the United States and Europe.
“These sites attract Bitcoin and AI miners [or] “Machine learning customers who have very high-power computing requirements,” Payne said. For context, 1 megawatt could power between 400 and 900 homes per year, according to Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
About $80 million will be used to acquire an additional 200 megawatts of capacity across 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. Payne noted that this is in addition to the existing Akron facility, which has capacity 100 megawatts in Ohio, which it purchased in June.
“The United States is an attractive market for us in many ways, largely due to tremendous demand from domestic customers, a mature and robust energy industry with many flexible and deregulated markets, political and regulatory stability, and the attractiveness of institutional investors,” Payne said. “The United States has an abundance of stranded, underutilized power generation assets that are tied to some of the world’s lowest-cost electricity sources, 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 the owner that owns the underlying infrastructure assets.”
Akron’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 especially in the United States, is unprecedented and huge. The customers we serve have energy-intensive platforms that require a tremendous amount of professionally managed and operated electrical infrastructure.
The remaining $30 million will be used to develop an AI cloud service project at Akron’s data center in Norway to help serve the generative AI and large language model training markets. “Over the past year, there has been a significant market acceleration in demand for generative AI and applications of large learning models,” he said.
But there is a lack of specialized physical infrastructure to run the computers and work behind most of these products. Akron aims to bridge this gap by providing the core infrastructure layer on which the AI sector depends.
In the past year, there has been a “meteoric rise in AI applications” as well as the potential growth and adoption of Bitcoin in key institutional markets as ETF approval nears, leaving niche data centers like Akron’s “poised to continue to expand significantly.” said Payne.