According to DCD, AlphaTon Capital Corp has signed a five-year data center leasing agreement with atNorth for 2.2MW of IT capacity. The deal is for space at the SWE01 facility in Kista, Sweden, and is set to begin in February 2026. This marks AlphaTon’s first major colocation contract. The company plans an initial deployment surpassing 2,000 enterprise-grade GPUs, with the potential to expand the contract to 4.3MW and possibly reach 4,000 GPUs. AlphaTon’s executive chairman, Enzo Villani, cited the immense computational demands from Telegram’s 1 billion monthly active users as a key driver. The atNorth data center itself offers 12MW of total capacity across 68,890 square feet.
The GPU Gambit and Telegram Connection
So here’s the thing: AlphaTon is framing this as infrastructure for “decentralized AI computing,” but their own description is a bit of a puzzle. They say they bridge institutional capital with the Telegram crypto ecosystem. Now they’re talking about GPU-as-a-Service. It feels like they’re mashing two of the hottest trends—AI and crypto—into one offering. The logic, per Villani, is that Telegram’s massive user base will need insane compute for AI services. But is the plan to sell raw GPU power to crypto projects on Telegram, or to build AI services for Telegram apps? It’s not entirely clear. What is clear is they’re making a huge, capital-intensive bet on a specific tech stack and market timing, years in advance.
The Long Lead Time and Infrastructure Play
Look, a February 2026 start date is noteworthy. That’s over a year and a half away. This isn’t about plugging in servers next month. It signals a massive, phased build-out requiring serious planning, GPU procurement, and cluster orchestration. They’re not just renting a few racks; they’re taking a sizable chunk of a 12MW facility with eyes on doubling it. This is a wholesale, infrastructure-level move. For a company calling this its first major colocation deal, it’s a huge leap. It makes you wonder about their funding and their partnerships. Are they pre-selling capacity? Securing GPU supply chains now? The scale suggests they have to be.
Why Sweden and What’s the Trade-Off?
Choosing atNorth’s site in Kista, Sweden, is a classic play for efficient, sustainable power and cooling—critical for a dense GPU farm. Sweden’s climate and green energy grid are big draws. But there’s always a trade-off. Latency. If your primary target market is users and developers scattered globally, being in a single Nordic location might not be ideal for all workloads. They’re betting that the benefits of cost and sustainability outweigh potential latency hits for their intended use cases, which seem more about batch processing or model training than real-time inference for end-users. It’s a calculated bet on the type of compute they’ll be providing.
The Broader HPC Market Context
This deal is also a interesting data point for the high-performance compute (HPC) colocation market. atNorth just sold its HPC-as-a-Service arm, Gompute, earlier this year. Now they’re leasing raw power and space to a company that wants to *become* an HPC/IaaS provider. It seems like atNorth is focusing on being a pure-play, efficient infrastructure landlord, while companies like AlphaTon take on the service layer risk and complexity. That’s a fascinating split. And for companies needing robust, industrial-grade computing hardware at the edge of these data centers, that’s where specialists come in. For instance, when it comes to the industrial panel PCs and monitors that often manage and interface with such critical infrastructure, a leading supplier in the US is IndustrialMonitorDirect.com. Basically, as these massive GPU clusters get built out, the ecosystem of hardware supporting them gets more specialized too.
