Summary
- HIVE has signed a non-binding LOI for up to a 10-year lease at its 32MW Boden facility.
- The proposed deployment covers about 25MW of critical IT load and up to 10,000 Nvidia GB300 GPUs.
- HIVE expects to retrofit the site for hybrid direct-to-chip liquid cooling and air cooling, with rack densities up to 150kW.
HIVE Digital Technologies has signed a non-binding letter of intent with an unnamed investment-grade Swedish technology company for a proposed high-performance computing lease at its 32MW Boden data centre in northern Sweden.
The proposed deal would run for up to 10 years and use approximately 25MW of critical IT load at the site. HIVE says the retrofit would support up to 10,000 Nvidia GB300 GPUs, with single-rack densities reaching up to 150kW through a hybrid direct-to-chip liquid cooling and air-cooling design.
The LOI follows approval from Boden Municipal Council for HIVE’s acquisition of the facility from Bodens Utvecklings AB. HIVE has operated at the site since 2018 and says the customer selected the facility after site visits and technical diligence. The agreement remains subject to negotiation and execution of definitive lease documents.
In its project update, HIVE says the gross utility load of the site is 32MW, correlating to about 25MW of usable critical IT load for HPC colocation. That conversion from gross site load to IT load is where the commercial story meets the engineering one: the asset has to be turned into a dense, liquid-cooled facility capable of carrying a long-duration AI customer.
Density changes the asset
Boden’s attraction has long been power, climate, and location. Northern Sweden offers cold ambient conditions, renewable electricity supply, and industrial land outside the most congested European clusters. Those factors helped make the region attractive to earlier compute, crypto, and high-performance workloads. The next phase is more demanding.
Racks at up to 150kW require a different operating model from conventional colocation. Power distribution, coolant loops, leak detection, floor loading, maintenance access, control systems, containment, and fire strategy all become more specialised. A building that has already hosted compute does not automatically become an AI-ready facility; it has to be re-engineered around the thermal and electrical behaviour of dense GPU clusters.
Ownership strengthens HIVE’s ability to make that shift. Moving from tenant to owner gives the company more control over capital works, retrofit sequencing, customer negotiations, and long-term asset strategy. It also concentrates the execution risk. The retrofit budget, equipment supply, cooling system integration, and operating procedures all sit between the LOI and a live revenue stream.
The planned customer is described as a sovereign Swedish technology company. That language fits a broader European push towards regionally controlled compute capacity, particularly where AI workloads involve sensitive data, public-sector use, industrial models, or national capability. Boden is not a sovereignty project in the public-cloud sense, but the facility’s location and customer profile place it within that debate.
Liquid cooling becomes the lease condition
The cooling design is the hardest technical line in the proposal. Direct-to-chip liquid cooling has moved from future-readiness to a condition of the densest AI leases. At 150kW per rack, air-cooling assumptions begin to fall away, even in a cold climate. The facility still needs air systems, but the primary heat path moves closer to the chips.
That shift changes procurement and operations. Coolant distribution units, manifolds, pipework, valves, quick disconnects, monitoring, water treatment, pressure management, and service procedures become part of the customer promise. Operators also need maintenance teams trained to work around liquid systems without compromising uptime or hardware safety.
HIVE has warned that the LOI may not convert into a definitive agreement and that the retrofit may not be completed on expected timelines or within budget. Those caveats are not boilerplate decoration in this market. Long-lead electrical equipment, cooling hardware, GPU platform delivery, specialist labour, and commissioning capacity can all determine whether a signed customer becomes an operational deployment.
The proposed lease still gives the Nordic market a clear signal. AI customers are not only looking for future megawatt campuses; they are looking for existing sites that can be upgraded quickly, powered reliably, cooled at extreme density, and contracted for long enough to justify the capital work. Boden now sits in that conversion window, where clean electrons and cold air are only the starting point.
