Data centers worldwide rely on affordable energy and community support to function, but all too often, sources of affordable energy also drive community opposition.
The United States is home to 1,958 active data centers, with another 714 under construction and nearly 3,200 more in planning stages. National leader Virginia and second-place Texas are both planning to overdouble their data center square footage by 2030, whereas data center expansion in California has come to a near standstill.
Across Europe, Germany leads the way with 529 data centers (4.4 percent of the global total), followed by the United Kingdom, France, the Netherlands, and Italy. Overall, there are about 3,400 data centers across 45 European nations, but power constraints are forcing operators to look toward Nordic countries that are blessed with hydropower and naturally cold waters.
European data center power demand is expected to grow from 96 terawatt-hours in 2024 to 168 TWh by 2030. As in the U.S., data center expansion adds stress to both electric generation capacity and cooling waters — along with other environmental concerns.
This rapid growth has, however, led to localized opposition on both continents. In the U.S., $64 billion in data center projects were blocked or delayed by bipartisan local opposition in just the last 2 years. Republican opponents tend to focus on tax incentives and energy grid strain, while Democrats address environmental impacts and resource consumption.
In Pennsylvania, while Governor Josh Shapiro was welcoming a $20 billion investment in data centers by Amazon, the advocacy group Lancaster Stands Up complained that data centers will cause “dirty electricity sources … to stay online” to meet increased power needs. In San Marcos, Texas, opponents blocked a $1.5 billion data center on the grounds that it would further stress already insufficient water sources.
Local opposition is increasingly effective in Europe as well. Just last month, the city parliament of Groß-Gerau (just outside Frankfurt, Germany) stopped construction of a planned 174-MW, €2.5 billion project by Vantage Data Centers over fears of rising costs, diminished water and environmental resources, ugly aesthetics, and skepticism over job creation. Local opposition is also thwarting data center construction in Hanau and Maintal.
As the Russia-Ukraine war drags on and Middle Eastern data centers are casualties of another war, data-hungry European customers today are looking north to the hydropower capital of the world and to Norway-based Viking Digital.
Viking is building out a large-scale, neutral digital infrastructure platform in a massive effort to provide 1.8 gigawatts of electricity from clean hydropower and biomass to power data centers across the continent. The electricity is cheap enough to reduce normalized customer costs per GPU-hour by 20 percent from global benchmarks. The Viking facilities also employ advanced natural cooling using cold coastal/fjord waters, not local groundwater.
Across the pond, President Trump has mandated that large data centers find their own energy sources.
Those are two reasons why Viking’s facilities are welcomed in their communities as job and revenue providers in sync with the local environment. This local support, together with strong grid reliability and high-voltage infrastructure access, and robust fiber routing, enables Viking to support low-latency connectivity into key European hubs.
Viking has been thinking — and acting — big, with four facilities in Norway, one in Finland, and plans for additional generation capacity across all three Nordic nations — all to support new hyperscale, AI, and cloud data centers and enable them to operate without draining local water and energy resources.
Already, Viking Digital’s campus portfolio includes five sites totaling over a million square meters of land with a combined planned capacity exceeding 1.8 GW. First delivery from the planned 300 MW VDC1 campus is targeted by year-end 2027; it is supported by new 132-kilovolt infrastructure and uses naturally cold fjord water for cooling.
The flagship VDC2, which will offer over 950 MW of electricity to customers, is anchored by direct access to a 420-kV transmission corridor, enabling phased hyperscale deployment. It is due to come online later this year.
A third, industrial-grade coastal campus is starting small but plans to support 300 MW over the long term. Viking also has a construction-ready data-center-zoned site with an 80 MW application in place that can be upgraded to 100 MW. It has ongoing conduit installation for fiber and power, and is in immediate proximity to major grid infrastructure for accelerated delivery.
Viking’s first campus outside Norway (in Finland) is fully zoned and development-ready, with 50 MW secured and a pathway to 200 MW from biomass (sawdust from pulp and paper operations) by early 2028. It, too, is supported by efficient natural cooling from adjacent coastal waters.
Viking’s business model also envisions additional cold-water campuses using hydropower and naturally cold water that keep both economic and environmental costs low — major advantages in this emerging industry. Another major advantage is the proximity of Viking’s campuses to key submarine cable routes that link Norway to major hubs in the United Kingdom, Denmark, and continental Europe with low-latency, high-speed connectivity and minimal transmission loss.
Viking’s founder and strategic lead, Tor Langøy, says, “What we are doing at Viking is revolutionary — Nordic countries becoming major exporters of tokens and data to Europe.” The timing is right, too, what with Iran blowing up data centers in the Middle East. “We are proud,” he added, “to be enablers of the true power of AI. We are in the business of making sure we are optimizing AI clusters.”
Langøy cites Norway’s two-trillion-dollar sovereign wealth fund — built on revenues from its North Sea oil and gas profits — as an additional advantage for building data and AI supporting infrastructure in Nordic lands. These and other advantages, he believes, will make Viking Digital the most efficient player exporting tokens worldwide.
While the location, location, location advantages are huge, Viking Digital’s real strength is embedded in its business model. Its integrated tech stack platform enables commercializing high-density accelerated computing as a managed capability rather than as a commodity infrastructure product. The integrated operating model positions Viking to deliver production-grade accelerated computing environments with institutional execution standards.
Viking Digital embeds execution, procurement, integration, and operations expertise directly into its campuses to improve speed-to-service, utilization outcomes, and unit economics for enterprise, hyperscale, and sovereign/regulated customers. The level of sophistication is such that Viking can deliver hyper-local, highly secure AI compute environments needed for sensitive public-sector and regulated enterprise workloads.
Heading up the company’s tech stack is Venkat Thummisi, former head of core infrastructure at OpenAI, where he led the buildout of large-scale, high-performance computing and data center infrastructure. Thummisi’s teams work to align design, procurement, deployment, and ongoing optimization under a single integrated delivery model to accelerate time-to-service and support consistent performance at scale.
Langøy believes the combination of superior technology, affordable renewable energy, and cold-water cooling — plus quality personnel — makes Viking Digital a great choice for both investors and customers and a valuable partner for hyper scaling, micro scaling, AI, and cloud users.
Across the pond, President Trump has mandated that large data centers find their own energy sources, driving large firms to consider both natural gas and nuclear energy. Hydro is not an option across much of the United States except in Alaska, which, like much of Canada, has an abundance of naturally cold water and hydropower potential.
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Duggan Flanakin is a senior policy analyst at the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow who writes on a wide variety of public policy issues.
