Polar DC and Crusoe are expanding their partnership with a second data center project in Norway.
The two will work on DRA02, a 40MW data center located at Polar DC's Tørdal campus in Norway. Plans for the second building at the site were first revealed in July of this year.
Polar originally announced that Crusoe would be leasing capacity in Norway for the latter’s AI cloud in June 2025, signing on for 12MW of capacity. That deployment, at Polar’s DRA01 facility, is now live, providing 12MW of IT.
The upcoming DRA02 will be built next to the 12MW DRA01 facility, which is located on a 60,000 sqm (645,835 sq ft) plot in the municipality of Drangedal. DRA01 was also developed in partnership with Crusoe, and is now live. The data center hosts Crusoe Cloud's AI infrastructure.
Details about the size of the second building have not yet been provided, nor have construction timelines.
DRA02 will also house AI infrastructure for Crusoe, including Nvidia Vera Rubin NVL72 systems.
Andy Hayes, CEO of Polar, said: “Our ambition has always been to help our customers develop the future of AI, and our relationship with Crusoe is a great example of that in action. We’ve successfully delivered DRA01, Crusoe is live and operating in Norway, and we’re now moving forward together with the next phase of our partnership. The expansion into DRA02 demonstrates the strength of the collaboration and the confidence that comes from successful delivery.”
Cully Cavness, Crusoe’s co-founder, president and chief strategy officer, added: “Our expansion with Polar in Norway lets Crusoe serve some of the world's most innovative companies with reliable access to Crusoe Cloud’s AI cloud services. What makes Tørdal stand out is that it runs on 100 percent renewable hydroelectric power — the kind of innovative energy source that aligns with our value of bending the arc of energy towards sustainability. Polar has been a solid partner to help us scale our presence in Europe.”
In early June, Polar DC announced that it had raised an €800 million ($932.2m) senior secured bond in the Nordic bond market to refinance the existing debt on the DRA01 facility, as well as complete construction of two additional facilities – one of them likely DRA02 – in 2026 and 2027.
Polar is also looking to develop a 40MW data center called HER01 in Heroya, a peninsula in Telemark County on the country’s southeast coast. Polar DC has other projects in Porsgrunn and near Oslo.
Launched just last year, Polar DC describes itself as a developer of “high-performance data centers optimized for AI and high-density computing workloads." H.I.G. Capital acquired a majority stake in the company in October last year.
Founded in 2018, Crusoe originally placed cryptomining facilities along oil & gas pipelines, using natural gas that would have otherwise been burned off to mine Bitcoin. The company launched a GPU cloud service from colocation facilities in 2023, and has since pivoted away from crypto, selling that business to NYDIG. The company also develops permanent data centers for other companies, including a large data center campus in Texas alongside Oracle for OpenAI’s Stargate project.
Crusoe currently operates a European presence in Iceland within atNorth's ICE02 facility. Crusoe has also partnered with Digital Realty and Equinix (Virginia) in the US.
The company currently operates seven cloud regions, including two in Iceland and one in Norway. In the US, the company has regions in Houston, Texas; Ohio; Virginia; and Sparks, Nevada.
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