Summary
- Bulk Infrastructure has bought municipal land at Longum Nord in Arendal for NOK600m.
- The site sits within Eyde Material Park, which markets large industrial plots and power availability.
- Bulk is targeting a 150MW grid connection by the end of 2029.
Bulk Infrastructure has bought land at Longum Nord in Arendal, Norway, adding another power-led development position to the Nordic data centre map.
The municipal plot, located within the wider Eyde Material Park area, was approved for sale by Arendal officials for NOK600m. The site had previously been earmarked for a battery recycling facility before those plans were dropped.
Eyde Material Park describes Longum Nord as an industrial plot with an approved regulatory plan and groundwork already under way in parts of the area. The park markets the Longum plot as 820,000 sq m and places it close to Morrow Batteries’ gigafactory site.
Powered land stays scarce
The Arendal acquisition is a classic Nordic data centre story: land, power, industrial zoning, and a developer willing to wait for grid capacity. Bulk is targeting a 150MW grid connection by the end of 2029, a timeline that shows how long the conversion from land purchase to energised capacity can be even in a region known for renewable electricity and cool-climate development.
Norway has long appealed to data centre developers because of its renewable power base, lower ambient temperatures, and political interest in industrial diversification. But the market is not exempt from grid planning constraints. Large AI and high-performance computing loads are pushing requests upwards, and the strongest sites are those that can show a credible route to connection rather than a generic claim of green power nearby.
Bulk already operates across Nordic digital infrastructure, combining data centres, fibre networks, and industrial real estate. That gives the company a platform logic for a site such as Longum Nord: it can think about the land as part of a wider system of power, connectivity, logistics, and customer demand rather than as a single speculative project.
Industrial parks become data centre battlegrounds
Eyde Material Park’s pitch is built around industrial symbiosis, green transition industries, and large-scale power availability. Data centres increasingly fit into that language, but they also complicate it. A 150MW data centre connection competes for electrical capacity that could otherwise support battery manufacturing, materials processing, hydrogen, or other energy-transition industries.
That competition is becoming more visible across Europe. Governments and municipalities want the investment and tax base that data centres bring, but they also need to decide how much grid capacity should be allocated to digital infrastructure when other industries are also electrifying. A data centre can be a long-term anchor load, but it is not labour-intensive in the same way as manufacturing.
The question for Arendal is whether a Bulk data centre can be integrated into the industrial park’s wider energy and infrastructure strategy. Heat reuse, grid flexibility, staged development, and local supply-chain commitments could all become part of the planning and political discussion.
The acquisition does not by itself guarantee capacity. It does, however, give Bulk a large, planned industrial site in a market where suitable land and future power access are increasingly hard to assemble. In the AI infrastructure cycle, that is enough to make Arendal more visible.
