Crusoe Energy, best known for running data centers on flare gas, has announced a deal to locate GPU processors in atNorth's ICE02 data center in Iceland.
The GPUs will deliver Crusoe's cloud service and run on renewable power, but the announcement is a departure from Crusoe's normal business model, which is to site its own containerized micro data centers at sites where there is stranded energy, such as otherwise-wasted natural gas at oil wells.
It is also Crusoe's first project in Europe.
"I'm thrilled that our quest to source low-carbon power has led us to Iceland," said Cully Cavness, Crusoe's co-founder and president. "This partnership with atNorth allows us to bring the concentrated energy demand of compute infrastructure directly to the source of clean, renewable geothermal and hydro energy."
The atNorth ICE02 site has more than 80MW of renewable power from geothermal and hydro sources, and Iceland has an increasing number of international fiber connections.
The country has previously had a cryptomining boom and is now being proposed as a site for expansion in energy-hungry AI processing.
Crusoe first launched with a service to deliver containerized data centers to oil wells in the US, where they would harness natural gas that would otherwise be "flared off" and wasted, using the energy for Bitcoin mining.
It now offers the service for other stranded energy assets, potentially including solar or wind farms generating excess power that would be "curtailed." It has also extended its compute services to HPC and AI.
"AI and machine learning are driving the demand for data centers to grow at a record rate," said Chris Dolan, Crusoe's Chief Data Center Officer.
atNorth spun off from Nordic services company Advania in 2017 and was bought by Swiss investor Partners Group, which Partners Group in 2021.
It recently announced a new data center, FIN04 in Finland, along with another Finnish site and one in Denmark. In Iceland, it has announced a new 12MW facility, ICE03. The company also recently, bought Gompute, a provider of cloud HPC services.
