Infrastructure Startup to Build $10 billion AI Factory in Norway

An AI infrastructure startup founded at the start of this year has emerged from stealth mode to disclose a $10 billion deal to build an AI factory in Norway.Volta Infra, which has offices in London, New York and Palo Alto, has also raised $300 million in a seed round and Series A round at a valuation of $2.4 billion.The company’s launch was confirmed in a statement on Tuesday, in which Volta referred to a “landmark $10 billion strategic partnership with an AI lab to develop an AI factory in Europe alongside Bitdeer."The AI lab in question was not named. Bitdeer is a crypto-mining company that will work in tandem with Volta to provide the compute capacity.Volta said the new facility will deliver 133 megawatts and be powered by Nvidia’s Vera Rubin hardware system. The project is the first step in what is an ambitious development program that is targeting the delivery of multiple gigawatts of power capacity across North America and Europe by 2030.Related:US Commerce Department Awards GlobalFoundries $300M for PhotonicsVolta said it will use Nvidia’s DSX platform to develop sites; the startup is a member of Nvidia’s Cloud Partner program, an ecosystem of cloud providers using Nvidia tech to provide AI infrastructure.Volta also agreed to a deal with Azora, under which the asset manager will provide $5 billion in financing to Volta.While the last couple of years have seen an explosion in the number of AI infrastructure providers, Volta said its proposition holds unique appeal as “the world’s first fully vertically integrated AI infrastructure platform, extending beyond technology into capital formation,” according to a statement.The Series A round was led by Azora, Andreessen Horowitz, Altimeter and Nvidia.“Every technology revolution has run on a physical layer beneath it. Railways carried industrialization. Electricity lit manufacturing. Fiber carried the internet,” CEO Richard Boada said in a statement. We founded Volta because compute should be financed, developed, and commercialized with the principles and scale of infrastructure.”Investor Andreessen Horowitz said in a blog post: “Neoclouds tend to begin with one half of the problem: they have capital and real assets, or they have cloud software and GPU operations. Volta has both. There aren’t many neocloud teams that can actually secure power, structure billions of dollars of capital, develop data centers and run a production cloud. Volta has assembled one of the few teams that can.”About the AuthorContributing WriterGraham Hope has worked in automotive journalism in the U.K. for 26 years, including spells as editor of leading consumer news website and weekly Auto Express and respected buying guide CarBuyer.