Volt, a new AI data center company, has launched in the Netherlands with plans to expand its network across Europe, the US, and the Middle East.

The firm will offer an initial 14MW of capacity to its customers from Switch Datacenters’ AMS4 facility in Amsterdam, and has identified five other projects it hopes to pursue.

It is led by Han de Groot, a co-founder of Dutch data center firm Switch and head of the De Groot Family Office wealth management firm.

Writing on LinkedIn, de Groot said: “Twelve months ago, I decided to dedicate myself full-time to bringing an AI gigafactory to the Netherlands: building on our world-leading Dutch digital infrastructure heritage to serve the European market for AI cloud, model training, and inferencing.

“Today, that vision is becoming reality. Together with a growing team of developers, engineers, and strategists, I have founded Volt: the Dutch developer and operator of AI Factories, built to make countries AI makers, not AI takers.”

De Groot has been leading the Dutch bid to host one of the European Union’s 300MW AI gigafactories, five supercomputing clusters that will be built across the continent to boost European compute power.

If the Dutch bid is successful, the AI gigafactory will form part of Volt’s offer. Elsewhere, it plans to take 42MW space in a new Switch data center, likely the company’s AMS5 facility that is currently under construction at a site four miles outside Amsterdam.

Elsewhere, the company said it is embarking on a joint venture with Switch in Poland, to take between 30-100MW of space at a data center the company is planning near Warsaw. This was announced earlier this year with a targeted capacity of 90MW, and building work is due to commence in 2026.

Further afield, it said it plans to take 400MW of space at a data center currently under development in Dallas, Texas, but did not name the site in question. It said it is also in discussions about a 129MW project in the UAE, but again did not go into specifics.

Volt will offer a variety of services, from powered shell all the way through to a complete managed AI platform. It says it can help customers access GPUs from Nvidia and AMD.

Amsterdam is one of Europe’s busiest data center markets, though a moratorium on new developments, imposed in 2019, has hindered its growth.