The newly established real estate development company Hyperco plans to invest a total of approximately EUR 200 million in existing and new data centers over the next two years. Hypercon was founded last year by shareholders Ville Vartiainen, Timo Pohjanpalo and Aleksi Taipale, who became CEO.
Hyperco has raised equity financing for its investments from the Danish-based real estate investment company Nrep and the employment pension company Varma. The parties will not disclose the contributions. In addition, Hyperco uses debt financing.
According to Vartiainen, the real estate company's idea from the beginning has been to focus specifically on data centers.
"Data centers in Finland and the Nordic countries are still a relatively small segment, but it is growing rapidly," says Vartiainen. “Our total investment capacity with the financing of Nrep and Varma is EUR 200 million, which will be invested in the coming years. Let's get started here, in Finland.”
Hyperco, which is now starting operations, intends to purchase data or server centers and lease them to companies that use them. Customers could be, for example, domestic and international technology companies providing cloud services or Nordic telecommunications companies.
Hyperco's operations also include the development of data centers. “We will become long-term owners of the properties and customers will become long-term tenants,” says Vartiainen. Within five years, Hyperco aims to manage more than one billion euros worth of data centers in the Nordic countries.
Hyperco's goal is also to focus on sustainable development and the circular economy. The aim is to develop the use of renewable energy and waste heat recovery in data centers. Running the servers generates a lot of surplus heat that Hyperco says could be used as district heating in the future.
Hyperco's founding partner Aleksi Taipale notes that the technology for waste heat recovery already exists. “For example, the surplus heat of a medium-sized 10-megawatt data center can heat about 12,000 apartment buildings, or the size of a small town,” Taipale says.
On a Finnish scale, a ten-megawatt data center is already large. This size class includes, for example, the Mäntsälä plant of the Russian search engine company Yandex. The capacity of Google's Hamina data center in Sweden, on the other hand is estimated to be around 100-160 MW, before the latest expansion.
onas Lemström, Director of NREP, believes that the growth in the amount of data will continue to be strong, which will ensure an increase in demand for data centers. “This makes this as yet undeveloped real estate segment interesting to us,” says Lemström. According to Varma's real estate analyst Miika Tuoko, Finland's location and expertise create great opportunities for the development of data centers and infrastructure. "It would be socially important to get new data center investments in Finland," says Tuokko.
