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A new company has launched with a strategy of converting offices in major cities into data centers to address the heightened demand for the facilities.
Based in London, EdgeNebula says it can convert a vacant commercial building into a data center in as little as two months and at significantly lower cost than ground-up data center projects. The company announced its launch in a press release this week, saying it aims to "enable a city's power grid to stand up to energy demands of the AI boom."
"Destroying forests and wildlife habitats and ploughing up fields to build massive datacenters, which then require vast amounts of electricity and water, is simply not sustainable," EdgeNebula CEO Peter Hannaford said in a statement.
Hannaford previously served as chairman of Datacenter People and as a vice president at Schneider Electric, Data Center Dynamics reported.
The launch comes as U.S. developers have been eyeing similar conversion projects as land in some of the tightest data center markets becomes harder to secure.
In Silicon Valley, data center developers have been attracted to vacant office buildings left behind by tech companies as the city has faced high vacancy rates, leaving empty office buildings prime for new uses.
On Thursday, Patmos filed plans to convert the former The Kansas City Star printing press building downtown into a 400K SF AI innovation facility, the Kansas City Business Journal reported.
In 2022, Dover, Delaware-based Raeden and Detroit-based real estate firm Bedrock announced a partnership to develop a carrier hotel data center at the former Detroit News Building, Data Center Dynamics reported.
Demand for data centers has surged over the last two years, driven by the artificial intelligence boom. Vacancy rates for data centers declined in the first half this year in major markets like Northern Virginia, which saw vacancy fall to 0.9% from 1.8%, and Chicago, which saw the biggest year-over-year decrease to 2.4% from 6.7%, according to CBRE.
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