Summary
- Magnora Data Center and Blix Group have agreed a 50:50 joint venture for an Oslo brownfield conversion.
- The site starts with 1MW of available power and could scale to 9MW subject to grid, cooling, and structural limits.
- Rear-door heat exchangers and direct liquid cooling are planned for rack densities up to 100kW.
Magnora Data Center has agreed a 50:50 joint venture with Blix Group to convert part of a former Norwegian payments infrastructure facility in metropolitan Oslo into a data centre designed for AI and edge workloads.
The project is based in the former Bankenes Betalingssentral, or Norwegian Payment Clearing House, where existing electrical, cooling, and fibre infrastructure gives the partners a starting point that differs materially from a greenfield hyperscale scheme.
Magnora said the facility has 1MW of power available initially. Technical studies indicate that the site could be expanded to as much as 9MW, depending on grid capacity, cooling provision, and the weight limits of the existing structure. An application for additional electrical capacity is already in the local grid operator’s queue.
The companies intend to use a combination of rear-door heat exchangers and direct liquid cooling, with the design aimed at supporting rack densities of up to 100kW. That puts the conversion squarely into the range required for higher-density accelerated computing rather than conventional low-density colocation alone.
Blix Solutions already operates its NR5 Oslo data centre in the same building. The new venture is intended to place dedicated AI capacity alongside conventional colocation and storage services, while using existing connectivity into multiple high-capacity fibre routes linking Oslo with other European markets.
Magnora will also establish a wholly owned operating company to build and run the new data centre. That operational element is notable because the group’s broader development model has historically focused heavily on advancing projects towards ready-to-build status before bringing in operators or infrastructure investors.
A brownfield route to constrained power
The attraction of the project is not its absolute scale. Even at the full 9MW technical potential identified so far, the facility would be small compared with the 100MW-plus campuses moving through Nordic development pipelines.
Its value lies instead in the infrastructure already present. Buildings with usable power, cooling routes, fibre, appropriate structural capacity, and a data centre operator in occupation can potentially reach service considerably faster than a new campus that still requires land development, major utility works, and full mechanical and electrical construction.
That trade-off is becoming more important as AI infrastructure pushes rack densities sharply higher. Existing data halls designed around traditional air cooling cannot automatically accommodate dense GPU systems simply because spare floor space exists. Heat rejection, pipework, floor loading, electrical distribution, and redundancy arrangements all have to be considered together.
Magnora’s proposed mix of rear-door heat exchangers and direct liquid cooling suggests a staged approach. Rear-door systems can remove substantially more heat close to the rack while retaining some familiar air-based infrastructure, whereas direct liquid cooling moves coolant much closer to the processors. Supporting both gives the operator more flexibility over customer hardware and deployment density.
Power remains the harder constraint. The partners can begin with 1MW, but moving towards 9MW depends on a grid connection application that has not yet been awarded. That means the site benefits from existing electrical infrastructure without escaping Oslo’s wider capacity limitations.
Magnora explicitly linked its approach to speed-to-power, describing grid scarcity around Oslo as a constraint on new supply. The company has already expanded its Nordic data centre activities through Storespeed in Halden and larger development projects in Norway, Sweden, and Finland.
The Oslo conversion adds a different type of asset to that portfolio. Instead of advancing a large parcel of land towards a future hyperscale campus, the venture is taking an existing technical building and testing how much high-density capacity can be extracted from infrastructure that is already connected.
If the additional power arrives, the engineering challenge will be to scale the cooling and structural systems without losing the time advantage that justified the brownfield approach. Until then, the 1MW already available gives the partners a smaller but potentially faster route into a market where several proposed facilities remain dependent on future grid reinforcement.
