Akron Energya data center infrastructure company, closed a $110 million private financing round to expand its operations, the company's CEO, Josh Payne, shared exclusively with TechCrunch.
The round was led by Bluesky Capital Management and included participation from Kestrel 0x1, Nural Capital and Florence Capital.
The company launched in 2021 and started with a 5 megawatt site in Australia. It has since grown to more than 130 megawatts and has expanded to other countries and regions such as the United States and Europe.
“These sites attract both bitcoin miners and ai (or) machine learning customers who have very high-powered computing demands,” Payne said. For context, 1 megawatt can power between 400 and 900 homes per year, depending on the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
About $80 million will be used to acquire an additional 200 megawatts of capacity in new data centers in Ohio, North Carolina and Texas as part of its plan to increase the company's total megawatts by 130% by mid-2024. This is in addition to Akron's existing 100-megawatt facility in Ohio that it purchased in June, Payne noted.
“The United States is an attractive market for us in many ways, largely due to enormous demand from domestic customers, a mature and robust energy industry with several flexible and deregulated markets, political and regulatory stability and attractiveness to institutional investors” Payne said. “The United States has a large number of idle and underutilized power generation assets that are connected to some of the lowest-cost sources of electricity in the world, many of which are renewable.”
The company's U.S. data center portfolio is largely occupied by institutional-grade bitcoin mining companies, Payne said. “We are essentially a proprietary owner of the underlying infrastructure assets.”
Akron's business model focuses on the strategic acquisition of distressed data center assets around the world. “The current and future demand for data center capacity of all types that we are seeing globally, but especially in the US, is unprecedented and monumental. “The customers we serve have energy-intensive platforms and require an immense amount of professionally managed and operated electrical infrastructure.”
The remaining $30 million will be used to develop an ai cloud service project at the Akron data center in Norway to help serve the generative ai and large language model training markets. “Over the last year, there has been a profound market acceleration in demand for generative ai and large applications of learning models,” he said.
But there is a shortage of specialized physical infrastructure to power the computers and services behind most of these products. Akron aims to fill that gap by providing the underlying infrastructure layer that the ai industry depends on.
Over the past year, there has been a “meteoric rise in ai applications” as well as potential growth and adoption of bitcoin in major institutional markets as ETF approval looms, making centers specialized data centers like Akron's are “poised to continue to scale exponentially.” “Payne said.
