The new financing is implemented as debt capital (up to a high double-digit million amount. We could not verify the exact amount of the new debt financing, terms/tenor, etc.). The investor is the Stoneweg Icona Group (SWI Group), which had already announced back in February that it would take a majority stake in Polarise. At that time, concrete figures were mentioned: a €100M equity investment at a post-deal valuation of €0.5B for Polarise. This equity structure will now not be implemented; instead, as described, both sides agreed to carry out debt financing.
By the way, Polarise doesn’t just build AI Factories—it also operates them itself and sells the computing power directly via its own cloud platform as GPU- and AI-as-a-Service. So they are vertically integrated from the infrastructure all the way to the end customer. In doing so, the company relies on a modular AI-Pod concept with maximum energy density down to the rack level (starting from 150 kW initial output, scalable to well over 300 kW per rack). With their modular AI-Pod concept (the modules look like stylish shipping containers), the AI Factories / data centers can not only be built from scratch on greenfield sites, but also integrated into existing buildings. This is intended to lower implementation time and resource requirements compared to traditional greenfield projects.
Currently, Polarise operates locations in Oslo and Munich, with further ones in the pipeline. The plans in Amberg, Bavaria, are particularly ambitious. A new AI Factory with an initial capacity of 65 megawatts is set to be built there, with potential expansion up to 120 megawatts in the future.
CEO Michel B. explains: “Our growth strategy aims to build the European AI infrastructure of the future, with sustainable, highly efficient AI Factories and sovereign AI computing power for businesses.”
Even if this deal seems small compared to announcements from Google, Meta, AWS, or Microsoft, it shows that AI Factories are possible in Germany too and that capital is available. Over the coming weeks, we will evaluate whether to cover the data center topic more heavily, as it increasingly overlaps with our professional focus.
