Data Center Startup Yondr Pours $2 Billion To Enter U.S., Americas

Data center startup Yondr Group will leverage its $2 billion in private equity to enter the U.S. market and expand its data center footprint throughout the Americas.

European hyperscale data center developer and provider Yondr Group will spend $2 billion to significantly expand its data center footprint across the Americas—from the U.S. and Canada to Central and South America. The data center startup has bullish plans to rapidly build new data centers across five continents by 2024.

Yondr Group is a three-year-old data center startup that has secured $2 billion in private equity targeting the red-hot cloud provider market led by Google, Amazon Web Services and Microsoft, which need more data center space and computing capacity as demand for cloud services soars.

To lead this $2 billion investment venture, Yondr Group has appointed former Google data center leader Éanna Murphy to lead the investment, development and management of its various data center projects. Yondr Group’s founder and CEO, Dave Newitt, said the U.S. and rest of the Americas represent a huge opportunity for the Amsterdam-based startup.

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“Already, the USA’s data center capacity alone is more than twice that of Europe. And it’s continuing to grow, with a predicted 11GW of capacity in place by 2025,” said Newitt in a statement. “With Éanna’s market leadership and Yondr Group’s unrivaled ability to build cost-effective, secure and scalable data centers faster than anyone else, we’re bringing greater flexibility and sustainability to our clients in the Americas.”

Demand for cloud services has been skyrocketing since the global COVID-19 pandemic hit the U.S. in 2020, leading many businesses to turn to the public cloud to quickly enable their remote workforces. For example, the pandemic spurred a record-breaking third-quarter 2020 with data center spending reaching $37 billion.

The big three public cloud titans continue to invest billions each year in building data centers or leasing data center space and capacity from providers like Equinix, Digital Realty and Yondr Group. AWS, Microsoft and Google collectively now account for more than 50 percent of the world’s largest data centers across the globe, according to data from market research firm Synergy Research Group.

For example, Microsoft recently unveiled its largest data center expansion plan in the company’s history. The software and public cloud giant said it plans to spend billions building 50 to 100 new data centers each year with expectations to expand its Microsoft Azure data center presence into 10 new countries by the end of this year.

Worldwide spending on public cloud infrastructure is also hitting new heights. Public cloud infrastructure spending reached $13.3 billion in the third quarter of 2020, representing an increase of 13 percent year over year, according to IT research firm IDC.

Yondr Group said its market differentiation in the data center market come via its speed.

The startup has streamlined the entire data center development model, from investment through to operations, with the aim of becoming the fastest full-scale service provider of data centers in the world. The company has this ability by being a developer, owner operator and service provider of hyperscale data centers, which will likely be in high demand for years to come.

Yondr Group said it has already built several data centers in Europe for cloud providers with a focus on tier-one markets. Although the company declined to mention the exact locations, its website lists projects in Belgium, Finland and the Netherlands.

Yondr Group has two data center designs: HyperBloc for large campuses and MetroBloc for more dense and metropolitan areas. MetroBloc’s campus capacity ranges from 40MW to 150MW, while HyperBloc’s campus capacity reaches upward of 300MW.

In a bold move this year, Yondr Group said that all of its global data centers will be carbon-neutral at the point of handover to its customers.