EcoDataCenter banks 150MW Dalarna site ahead of permits

EcoDataCenter has signed a purchase agreement with Smedjebacken Municipality for 52 hectares in central Sweden, a site the company says can hold a 150MW data center campus with room to expand further. The deal, reported by Data Center Dynamics, makes this the Swedish operator's third campus in Dalarna County, following its original site in Falun and a second in Borlänge, and it arrives after a letter of intent that has been in place since 2019. Smedjebacken sits some 200km west of Stockholm.

Construction cannot start until building and environmental permits are finalized, which the company expects in early 2027; the lag is the point. Grid access and planning consent are now the scarce assets in the data center buildout, and this deal is a clean test: EcoDataCenter is buying land and a working relationship with a municipality before it needs to pour concrete.

EcoDataCenter already has two Dalarna campuses. The original, in Falun, launched in 2019 and could total 80MW at full build-out, while the second in Borlänge broke ground in September 2025 with a first phase due in 2027, set to offer 250MW and potentially more than 360MW. The new Smedjebacken site is smaller at 150MW planned, though the company says it can expand further.

EcoDataCenter was formed in 2015 as a joint venture between Falu Energi & Vatten and EcoDC AB, and Nordic real estate developer Areim took a majority stake in 2018 and merged it with Fortlax in 2019. In April 2025, it sold three facilities to CapMan Infra, two in Stockholm and one in Piteå, in a move Data Center Dynamics characterized as a hyperscale pivot. Selling that scattered portfolio is what makes the Dalarna concentration legible: the company is trading out of a general-purpose footprint and into campuses sized for AI cloud tenants.

EcoDataCenter counts Mistral AI, DeepL, and CoreWeave among its customers, and CoreWeave has been signing multi-billion-dollar AI cloud deals, including one with Hudson River Trading announced this month. A data center operator with that customer list is not running a spec building; a 150MW site in central Sweden clears at whatever price tenant demand supports before construction begins.

CEO Peter Michelson is quoted by Data Center Dynamics saying the company has its roots in the region and that Smedjebacken has been a strong partner since 2019, while municipal board chair Fredrik Rönning credits EcoDataCenter's sustainability ambitions as decisive. Whether those quotes are boilerplate or real, the seven-year gap between letter of intent and purchase agreement suggests a relationship that outlasted the usual permitting cycle. The industry default is to announce capacity first and discover the permit calendar later; Smedjebacken reverses that. Early 2027 is the date to watch, when building and environmental permits are expected to land and the 150MW campus either moves from paper to dirt or joins the queue.