From Sifted.eu, June 6:
Having just raised a €13m pre-seed round, evroc aims to raise €3bn within the next two years
European startups are often criticised for not being ambitious enough — but that doesn’t seem to be a problem for evroc.
The Swedish startup, which has just raised a €13m pre-seed round, wants to take on a goliath of the tech world: Amazon Web Services (AWS).
Over the next two years, it plans to raise €3bn — that averages out as €125m a month for everyone keeping score at home — to develop and operate two hyperscale data centres in Europe. By 2028, evroc wants to have established eight data centres and three software development hubs and employ 3,000 people on the continent.
“You have to be a bit crazy to do something like this,” says founder Mattias Åström.
But if evroc can reach its goal — to build a cloud provider that's both greener and more sensitive to data privacy than the American giants — the prize would be huge.
The lack of home-grown cloud providers in Europe
Today, only 13% of the computer storage in Europe is provided by European companies. According to Åström, US-based AWS has about 30% of the European market. The biggest European provider, Deutsche Telekom OVHcloud, holds 1-2% of the market.That’s bad for the European economy — but it’s also a problem for data privacy.
“Amazon, Google and Microsoft are really good, but US authorities have the right to see the data stored on non-American citizens. That means that many companies and authorities in Europe cannot put sensitive data on the American cloud and instead store it on servers in the cellar,” Åström says....
....MUCH MORE
It's all about cooling those computers.
"Can Iceland be to data what Switzerland is to money?"Norway's Green Mountain operates a data center at Stavanger with plans for another at Telemark.
There is some development talk for a couple other sites, one of which is actually in the Arctic.
Additionally, the Lefdal Mine Datacenter at Måløy is supposed to be the largest in Europe when it is completed.
