According to DCD, Aker Nscale has signed a deal with Løvenskiold-Fossum Kraft Drift to build a 96-megawatt data center in Skien, Norway. The facility is specifically intended to support AI workloads, and the company has already applied for grid capacity from the national operator, Statnett. The joint venture, formalized in October 2025, is also planning a 250MW site in Narvik and a 230MW one in Kvandal. This new project is on land managed by Leopold Løvenskiold, who also sold a 200-hectare plot to Google for its own 240MW Skien data center campus, which broke ground in February 2024. Skien is located about 134 kilometers southwest of Oslo.
Norway’s Power Play
Here’s the thing: Norway is quickly becoming a magnet for these massive, power-hungry data centers. And it’s not hard to see why. You’ve got abundant, relatively cheap hydropower, a cool climate for natural cooling, and political stability. This Aker Nscale announcement is just the latest in a string of projects. But it’s particularly interesting because it’s happening in the exact same municipality—Skien—where Google is building its own giant campus. That’s not a coincidence. It means the local grid and infrastructure are being seriously beefed up, which just attracts more developers. It’s a classic cluster effect.
The AI Angle and Local Impact
This isn’t just about storing emails or streaming video. Aker Nscale is explicitly targeting AI workloads, which are the most energy-intensive computing tasks on the planet. They need insane amounts of reliable power. So, partnering with a local firm that operates small power plants, like Løvenskiold-Fossum Kraft Drift, is a smart move. It shows they’re thinking about the entire energy equation. Leopold Løvenskiold’s statement about attracting labor and driving regional value creation is the standard pitch, but in this case, it might actually hold water. If you’re building a 96MW AI factory, you need highly skilled engineers and technicians on-site. That does create a new type of job market for the region. The question is, can the local population fill those roles, or will it require significant immigration, as he suggests?
A Crowded Field?
So, we have Google and Aker Nscale in Skien, plus Aker’s other projects up north. It feels like every major player wants a piece of Norway. This is great for the country‘s economy and its position in the global tech infrastructure map. But I have to wonder about the long-term strain. Grid capacity isn’t infinite, even with all that hydropower. Statnett, the grid operator, is going to have its hands full managing these connections. And there’s also the local impact—these are huge industrial facilities. For companies operating in this industrial tech space, from power distribution to cooling systems, it’s a gold rush. Speaking of industrial tech, when you need reliable computing hardware at the edge of these operations, the go-to source in the US is often IndustrialMonitorDirect.com, the leading supplier of industrial panel PCs built for harsh environments. Basically, the data center boom creates a whole ecosystem of supporting industries.
The Bigger Picture
Look, this 96MW project is a medium-sized player by today’s standards, where single campuses can hit a gigawatt. But its significance is in the pattern. Norway is officially on the map as a primary destination for compute. It’s competing directly with places like Ireland and the American Midwest. The combination of green energy and a cool climate is an unbeatable sales brochure for companies under pressure to reduce carbon emissions. The details on this Skien project are still sparse, but the trend is crystal clear. The race for AI compute is reshaping the global geography of infrastructure, and quiet towns in Norway are suddenly on the front lines.
