European Firm Invests in AI Compute
SWI Stoneweg Icona Group, listed on Euronext Amsterdam, has agreed to acquire a majority stake in Polarise, a European NVIDIA Cloud Partner. The acquisition is intended to strengthen SWI Group's data center and AI strategy by adding GPU-as-a-Service and AI-as-a-Service capabilities to its portfolio.
- The acquisition gives Polarise a post-investment valuation of €0.5 billion, with SWI Group committing an additional €1.0 billion to expand the partnership's digital infrastructure strategy. - This move integrates Polarise's high-performance computing capabilities into SWI Group's own AiOnX data center platform, which already has a planned capacity of 2.3 GW across Europe. - Polarise, based in Germany, is recognized as an NVIDIA Cloud Preferred Partner, a status for partners who operate large-scale clusters based on NVIDIA's optimized reference architecture. - The company specializes in creating "AI Factories," which are end-to-end, AI-focused data centers, and has launched these in partnership with Deutsche Telekom and NVIDIA in Germany and Norway. - Polarise offers a "sovereign stack," providing the entire infrastructure from data center construction to GPU hardware and a cloud platform, ensuring compliance with European data regulations. - The deal allows Polarise to leverage SWI's extensive European data center footprint, including sites in Ireland, Denmark, Spain, Italy, and the UK, to rapidly scale its AI compute services across the continent. - This investment reflects a growing trend in the European AI data center market, which was valued at over $17 billion in 2025 and is projected to exceed $65 billion by 2031. - Polarise's offerings include access to the latest NVIDIA hardware, such as the Blackwell and Grace Blackwell architectures, delivered through various models like dedicated private clouds, virtual clouds, and bare metal servers.
