The Data Centers Have Arrived at the Edge of the Arctic Circle

On the bank of the river that runs through the Swedish town of Borlänge, construction is underway on a sprawling new data center. The site previously housed a paper mill. When the developer, EcoDataCenter, broke ground in September, its CEO Peter Michelson declared, “The facility once produced paper, the raw material of the newspaper information age. Now, Borlänge will produce the raw material for AI and the next information age.”

The Borlänge facility is one of more than 50 currently under construction or soon to be developed across the Nordics—the region made up of Norway, Sweden, Finland, Denmark, and Iceland—as demand escalates for data centers suitable for training and running AI models. Nowhere else in Europe is data center capacity growing faster, according to research by consulting firm CBRE.

Last year, OpenAI announced it would deploy 100,000 GPUs in a tiny Norwegian fjord town in the Arctic ...