MERLIN PROPERTIES & EDGED ENERGY JV PLAN TO BUILD 4 ULTRA-EFFICIENT DATA CENTRES

PRESS RELEASE: MADRID, Spain and NEW YORK, USA – MERLIN Properties SOCIMI, S.A., the Iberian Peninsula’s largest and most technologically advanced REIT and a developer and operator of green assets, announced a long term, multi-phase strategic partnership with Edged Energy, a subsidiary of Endeavour devoted to net zero digital infrastructure, to build a major network of ultra-efficient, waterless data centres in the cities of Madrid, Bilbao, Barcelona and Lisbon, within MERLIN’s existing land bank.

“We service a wide range of customers, from high tech companies in our signature office buildings to international logistics operators in our warehouses,” says David Brush, co-founder of MERLIN and Special Advisor to the Data Centre Program at the company. “The Iberian region is perfectly positioned to be the principal gateway connecting the digital economies of Europe, North America, South America, Africa, the Middle East and beyond. This world class infrastructure platform will allow cloud and technology companies to better service and connect to a diverse customer base.”

“The Iberian Peninsula is fast-becoming one of the most strategically connected places in the world with excellent fibre networks and an abundance of solar and wind energy resources,” adds Jakob Carnemark, founder of Endeavor and a 25-year veteran of the industry, with more than $5B in data centre built. “This region is a major focus for us as we continue building the first carbon-neutral and water-neutral global platform for data centre edge infrastructure.”

Both MERLIN and Edged Energy are fully committed to the green building principles. Each of the initial four data centres will consume zero water for cooling, have a guaranteed Power Utilisation Effectiveness (PUE) of 1.15 annually, and use 67% less energy for cooling and overhead systems than average European data centres, which the Uptime Institute estimates to have a PUE of 1.46.

The power that each facility uses will come from local renewable energy sources, primarily MERLIN roof-mounted and ground PV installations. Each data centre will also have hours of battery energy storage which will allow for 24/7 renewable energy use and will dramatically increase its reliability. The sites in Barcelona and Madrid will support up to a total of 20MW of load each, while the data centre campus sites in Bilbao and Lisbon have the infrastructure to support hyperscale builds in excess of 100MW each (20MW in a first phase).

“Our team has built data centers for the last 25 years, yet these are some of the best sites from a fibre and power perspective that we have seen”, says Carnemark.

Additionally, Edged and MERLIN are also partnering to install a network of more than 100MW of advanced truck-charging positions to support the fast-growing shift to electric trucking.

“MERLIN is the largest logistics provider in the Iberian region and all of our clients will face competitive pressure to develop more sustainable business models. We can help them reduce their carbon footprint by building advanced EV charging stations for fleet operations that will also provide support to electric truck companies by providing access to our customer base and our investment in charging infrastructure,” says Brush.

For Carnemark, “Electric trucking is a competitive imperative of booming e-commerce logistics —reducing the cost per mile of transport by more than 60% —but the infrastructure investment is clearly a major hurdle. By deploying this infrastructure as part of the Edged platform, we can better support MERLIN’s logistics clients. “

Brush adds, “This partnership will allow us to provide more value to our shareholders and dramatically improve our added value offering to our logistics tenants, but it also helps us meet the needs of our most important stakeholder—the Earth.”

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