Thierry Labro: Can you help us understand the impact of Arcus’ takeover of European Data Hub, a 100% private player in Luxembourg?

: Over a period of five years, we worked hard and well with a fantastic team of around 20 people. After 15 years, a site like ours needed to invest to keep pace with growth, to replace older technologies with new, more efficient, greener technologies... We needed a partner who was not only active in the infrastructure sector, but who also understood our business and had the financial capacity to support us: Arcus Infrastructure Partners, the shareholder behind Portus, already had a strategy at European level, between the acquisition of existing sites and the development of new sites in different regions, particularly in Central Europe. They became shareholders in EDH.

The Wagner Group remained a minority shareholder. And at the end of 2023, we became Portus Data Centers Luxembourg. Today, more than 70% of our production site is occupied, but we will have to think about new infrastructures because, by the end of 2026, we will occupy 100% of our current site. With perhaps, in time, a third site in the Greater Region.

Don’t customers prefer well-known brands?

Our business is offering shared accommodation. In and of itself, we are completely compatible with Google, Microsoft or OVH in the sense that they offer cloud infrastructures. We need to be aware that Google, Microsoft and others have a certain responsibility for the continuity of the infrastructures that enable access to these applications and data, but they are not responsible for protecting the data itself.

Everything to do with backup, for example, remains the responsibility of the company that has taken the step of migrating this information to the public domain. Many companies don’t realise this until they have a problem. They think that Microsoft and Amazon, in particular, will guarantee the resilience of their data. But this is not the case. The most fundamental part of a computer room is access to continuous power, continuous cooling, continuous connectivity and the security of that space. We don’t touch the whole intelligent layer, the application part, the pure IT part.

The public cloud can still make sense, especially for customers of a certain size who need a certain degree of resilience and redundancy, but who have neither the skills nor the resources to invest in an infrastructure. A lot depends on how critical the IT is. A good number of studies show precisely that the costs of migrating to the public cloud and the savings promised by the flexibility of scalability and volume have not been delivered. Over an eight-year period, these platforms have been exceeded by an average of 10% a year.

Any company that would have decided to invest, say, five years ago on the basis of a TCO model would have had to bear the cost overrun. We guarantee to build its infrastructure and operate it at constant costs, which makes the depreciation forecasts much clearer. Personally, I’m more of a believer in hybrids. The future will not be exclusively pure colocation in data centres like ours, or hosting in pure public clouds.

We’re starting to see solutions that are truly disconnected. Is this also a selling point for you?

We’re not in the business of offering solutions for truly functional environments of the sovereign cloud type. But we are interested in the idea of working with partners who have this ambition and who specialise in the design, operation and support of end customers for clouds or sovereign environments, because we talk a lot about the cloud, but in reality these are sovereign IT environments that they guarantee to the end user. We’re not a bank, but we can certainly help them find solutions that enable them to opexise with partners. Today, we have manufacturers who are partners and who have financing programmes.

So they sell you the technology over 20 years, for example, and you sell it back to them? Do you resell its capabilities?

We can lease or even resell capacity to customers. But we don’t have control over the data, we don’t manage the cloud, we don’t have access... It’s really 100% managed by our customers. It’s a bit like leasing a car, if you like. We’re a technology enabler. We facilitate access to technologies so that customers can build their own solution and manage it as they wish, in a way that is economically viable for them. There are many customers who prefer to invest in R&D, for example, in product or service development, which is their core business.

The first thing you wanted to show us were your cooling tubes. Are you aware of the issues surrounding the energy consumption of data centres, whether in terms of electricity or water?

It’s one of the big challenges facing the data centre industry, and not just in Luxembourg. There is a lack of awareness around data centres and the advantages they offer over the alternative. What is the alternative? That individual companies--small, medium-sized, large, whatever--host their own infrastructure? Our power losses are much lower to produce the same service. This infrastructure has been designed to be much more efficient. And that applies just as much to the electricity side as to the water side.

Moreover, unlike the big players who are always talking about PUE, power usage efficiency, which they try to bring down to 1 to show their efficiency [PUE is calculated by dividing the total energy consumed by that used solely for IT equipment. A PUE of 1 indicates perfect efficiency, while a higher PUE reflects higher consumption for cooling or other systems, editor’s note]. We also have data on WUE, water usage efficiency, which will soon also be in force in Luxembourg.

Luxembourg will be one of the first countries to transpose it into national law. There will be an obligation to report to a European platform set up by the European Commission. We already meet this threshold today. For very large companies, it will be another challenge. There may be exemptions. In the past, we’ve seen that sometimes very large companies are granted exemptions that small ones would not be...

We are ISO 9001, ISO 14001, ISO 50001, ISO 27001 and EN 50600-2 certified. This is not the case for the vast majority of individual players, who operate separate computer rooms... If we don’t invest in data centres, this digitalisation will happen anyway. It’s in our interest to move as much of this digital infrastructure as possible to data centres, whether in the public or private cloud, it doesn’t matter.

It’s always better for the environment than data centres spread across individual companies. As Portus, our number one strategic priority is to guarantee our services not only in compliance with all national and other legislation, but also with a concern for society as a whole. To minimise the long-term impact.

Arcus, investor behind Portus

Renamed Portus Data Centers, the Luxembourg company is now part of Arcus, a fund with €9.1bn of assets under management that has invested €7.7bn in equity in 21 companies active in the infrastructure, transport, logistics, energy and digital sectors. With long-term ambitions, it is a shareholder that regularly reinvests to keep its infrastructures up to date.

As far as data centres are concerned, Luxembourg is the group’s third port of call, and it plans to build new data centres, including one in Luxembourg and one in Saarland, or to acquire existing ones. The independent infrastructure fund management company is betting in particular on the 25% annual increase in data volumes produced and on its buy-and-build strategy of aggregating regional data centres.

Good to know

1. Based at the Cloche d’Or, European Data Hub was founded by the Wagner Group, in particular by , who is still chairman of the Wagner Group in Luxembourg and is the founder and creator of European Business Reliance Centre (EBRC).

2. EDH began operations in 2008 and has evolved over the years into a leading private player in the Luxembourg data centre sector, as EBRC is state-owned through Post Luxembourg and has since become Deep. Luxconnect has always been an initiative taken by the government precisely to offer greater digitalisation in Luxembourg with neutral infrastructures.

3. Wargaming, the publisher of World of Tanks for example, is a major customer. Two of the publisher’s four European sites are located at Portus Luxembourg, a third in Amsterdam and the last in Kazakhstan. 200,000 players come together thanks to these infrastructures.

This article was written in for the  magazine, published on 29 January. The content is produced exclusively for the magazine. It is published on the website as a contribution to the complete Paperjam archive. .

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