Polarise reserves half a Czech data center instead of building its own

Polarise has reserved 15 megawatts of liquid-cooled capacity at Prague Gateway, the 26MW facility České Radiokomunikace is building on a 56,000-square-metre plot on the outskirts of Prague, a deal announced last week that gives the German AI cloud firm its first capacity in Czechia, as Data Center Dynamics reported.

Polarise already operates an AI factory in Oslo, launched a second in Munich with Deutsche Telekom and Nvidia, and has a third in development near Frankfurt, with a further 65MW site in development outside Munich. Adding a Czech node through a landlord rather than a shovel suggests the AI cloud tier has settled into a hybrid playbook: too small to self-develop across a continent, too large to buy colocation by the rack.

Prague Gateway has taken its time: CRA announced the Zbraslav–Jíloviště project in 2022 with a 2024 start date, delayed it, said last year it was about to start ramping up, and broke ground late last year, with the first 700-rack phase due live before the end of 2027, roughly five years after the first announcement. That elapsed time is the ordinary cost of a European greenfield, and it is why a tenant with a grid to populate would rather reserve capacity in a hall already under construction than add its own project to the queue.

Inside the building, fifteen megawatts is more than half of Prague Gateway's 26MW design, while the first phase covers 700 of a planned 2,000 racks; should the reservation sit in that phase—and the coverage does not say which hall it occupies—the reserved block works out to around 21 kilowatts a rack against the facility's 13kW average, inside the 30kW ceiling CRA has said the design supports. Liquid cooling buys that density, which is what an AI cloud tenant is actually shopping for.

Polarise's founder and chief executive frames the Czech node as one piece of a larger machine: "Europe needs sovereign AI capacity, and it needs it fast – not from one mega-site, but from a network," Michel Boutouil said, describing GigaGrid as many smaller, connected AI factories that share workloads. CRA chief executive Miloš Mastník calls the facility designed for "precisely this type of customer." Both men reach for the same word: sovereign.

That is a wager that grid queue position and local consent will prove scarcer in Europe than scale, and it has something behind it: Prague Gateway sits on land CRA used for radio broadcasts, a conversion path that invites fewer objections than a greenfield campus. A distributed grid still leaves open the economics of many small sites: several smaller factories sharing workloads pay for long-haul interconnection that one mega-campus never buys, and whether that recurring cost is cheaper than the consent and queue risk it avoids is the question Polarise has just answered in the affirmative with someone else's concrete.

CRA brings an uncommon lineage: founded in 1963 as Správa radiokomunikaci and privatized in the 1990s, it was acquired in 2021 from Macquarie Asset Management by Cordiant Digital Infrastructure, a fund created by Cordiant Capital and listed on the London Stock Exchange, for a price the coverage leaves undisclosed. Neither counterparty is a hyperscaler, which places the asset on the tighter side of the capital hierarchy where hyperscaler-anchored capacity clears at infrastructure pricing and everything else has to earn its cost of capital on the strength of its tenants.

Cordiant gets commercial validation for phase one without selling 26MW into an empty market, and Polarise gets a Central European node without owning the shell; the catch is that the lease's credit runs through a company funding campuses in Oslo, Munich and near Frankfurt at the same time, and the reservation attaches no price, no term and no power contract. The half-disclosed deal is now the sector's default language.

Eleven megawatts are left to sell. CRA has said the site will offer waste heat, four meet-me rooms and two power feeds, which helps when the buyer is counting carbon or counting routes. Phase two gets priced off phase one's reference customer, and a GigaGrid node is a different reference than a tenant that wants 11MW in a single hall with a single credit behind it. Cordiant's second phase likely reads better in the second case.