Data center and AI cloud firm Crusoe is leasing a data center in Norway.

The company this week announced a strategic partnership with Polar to establish its first data center in mainland Europe.

Crusoe has signed a contract for a 12MW facility located in Norway, which will host Crusoe Cloud, the company’s GPU cloud services. The data center is expected to come online later this year, and has the ability to expand up to 52MW.

“Partnering with Polar brings Crusoe Cloud’s cutting-edge AI infrastructure directly to abundant, clean hydroelectric power. This allows our European customers to run their AI workloads with unparalleled performance without sacrificing their commitments to environmental responsibility,” said Chris Dolan, chief data center officer, Crusoe.

Crusoe currently operates a European presence in Iceland within atNorth’s ICE02 facility. Crusoe has also partnered with Digital Realty and Equinix in the US.

Launched last year, Polar bills itself as a developer of the “next generation of data centers to facilitate the latest developments in HPC and AI workloads.”

On its website, Polar says it has two AI-ready data centers available for customer deployment. DRA01, located on a 60,000 sqm (645,835 sq ft) plot in southeast Norway, reportedly has 12MW of IT load immediately available, with another 36MW in development. This is likely the site Crusoe is deploying its cloud.

“Polar is proud to partner with Crusoe, a company that deeply shares our values of collaboration and innovation,” said Andy Hayes, CEO of Polar. “Crusoe’s commitment to maximizing compute efficiency while minimizing environmental impact perfectly aligns with our mission to provide sustainable and scalable data center solutions. We are excited to support Crusoe’s rapid growth across the European region.”

DAL01, located on a 19,000 sqm (204,515 sq ft) plot 35km outside Bergen, reportedly has 20MW available with another 45MW in development. The site is said to be an existing industrial building previously used for manufacturing, and described as ready for fit-out for client needs. Polar said the site will use river cooling.

Polar is led by CEO Andy Hayes, who was previously CTO at hyperscale developer Yondr. Founded by Lian Group, alternative investment firm H.I.G. Capital acquired a majority stake in the company in October.

Crusoe was founded in 2018 and originally placed cryptomining facilities along oil & gas pipelines, using natural gas that would have otherwise been burned off to mine Bitcoin. In 2023, the company launched a GPU cloud service from colocation facilities, and has since pivoted away from crypto, selling that business to NYDIG.

The company has also begun building permanent data centers for other companies, and is developing a large data center campus in Texas alongside Oracle for OpenAI’s Stargate project. It also previously formed a $5bn joint venture with Chirisa and PowerHouse to develop data centers across the US – mostly for AI cloud firm CoreWeave. Crusoe is also planning a campus in Alberta, Canada.

Crusoe recently secured a $225 million credit facility from private credit firm Upper90 Capital Management and others to fund the expansion of its cloud platform.

According to the company’s latest ESG report, Crusoe has a 5MW deployment at Equinix’s Culpeper campus in Virginia.

The company currently operates four cloud regions: us-northcentral1-a, us-east1-a, us-southcentral1-a, and eu-iceland1-a.