Nscale closed a $790 million debt facility on May 11 from a syndicate of Norwegian and Nordic banks: ABN AMRO, DNB, Eksfin, Nordea, and SEB. The facility supports continued development of the Narvik AI data center, branded Stargate Norway, jointly developed with Aker and OpenAI. The facility is targeting 230 MW of initial capacity with an additional 290 MW of expansion already committed to design, totaling 520 MW at full term. The site at Kvandal, just outside Narvik, draws hydropower from the regional Rana grid and sits in latitude conditions that allow free cooling for most of the year.
The project's GPU commitment is 100,000 Nvidia units by year-end 2026. Microsoft separately announced earlier this spring that it is taking over the original OpenAI offtake position on the facility. The combined picture is a fully banked, hyperscaler-backed, hydropower-fed AI training campus that has every attribute every hyperscaler is now searching for and almost no operator has found.
Free cooling at high latitude is the cleanest version of the data center cooling story that the industry has been able to assemble in the AI era. Narvik sits at 68°N. Average annual temperature is below 5°C. The water in the Ofotfjord that the campus can draw from for heat exchange sits at 4 to 8°C year-round. Direct-to-chip cooling loops can reject heat through closed-loop seawater heat exchangers without any mechanical refrigeration for most of the operating envelope. The PUE achievable in that environment runs well below 1.1, which is roughly half the cooling overhead of a comparable facility built in Phoenix or Northern Virginia.
The order pipeline implications are large. A 520 MW campus with that cooling profile orders direct-to-chip CDUs, manifolds, and seawater heat exchangers at the same scale as a much larger conventional facility would order chilled water plant and cooling towers. The thermal architecture is simpler, which means the vendor set is narrower, which means the cooling vendors that have done the work on closed-loop direct-to-chip at sub-1.1 PUE conditions get the order.
The $790 million facility is structured against a hyperscaler offtake and a long-term hydropower contract. Norwegian bank syndicates are not in the habit of writing nine-figure data center facilities without those pieces in place. The fact that DNB, Nordea, SEB, and ABN AMRO all participated suggests the underwriting view of AI data center risk in Northern Europe is converging on a model that works for project finance: secure offtake, secure renewable power, and a thermal architecture that does not depend on contested water resources.
That model contrasts sharply with the U.S. project finance environment where rooftop air handlers and evaporative cooling towers are still the conventional thermal architecture and where community opposition has cancelled $41.7 billion in projects in Q1 2026 alone. Norwegian banks are underwriting a project finance package that looks low-risk because the cooling architecture eliminated the externalities that are blowing up U.S. permits. The financing terms reflect that.
Operators with European pipelines should be benchmarking against the Stargate Norway thermal architecture as the default baseline. Finland has its own version of this pattern with wind-powered, free-cooled hyperscale at lower latitude but similar thermal advantage. Alfa Laval's freshwater-loop cooling system ships into this exact use case. The vendor and infrastructure stack is converging on a model that works at Nordic latitudes and has limited transferability to lower-latitude geographies.
The harder question is whether U.S. operators try to import any of this architecture into the projects they are still pushing through hostile permitting environments in Wisconsin, Ohio, and Utah. The Nordic stack is not portable. Free cooling at 68°N becomes mechanical refrigeration at 40°N. But the closed-loop architecture, the explicit thermal isolation from contested water resources, and the project finance approach that treats cooling as a primary risk variable rather than an afterthought all transfer. The Nscale deal is the cleanest case study currently available of what a successful AI data center cooling architecture looks like when project finance demands it. U.S. operators should be reading the term sheet carefully.