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Fredriksen's Geveran Trading and Bulk's founder and chief
executive Peder Naerboe jointly committed to invest 400 million
Norwegian crowns ($49 million), it added.
Fredriksen's business empire includes the world's largest salmon
farmer Marine Harvest, offshore drilling firm Seadrill and oil
tanker company Frontline, among others.
Naerboe said he would retain a majority stake following a share
issue of between 400 million and 550 million crowns, but
declined to say how much Fredriksen had agreed to invest.
Bulk Infrastructure plans to increase by tenfold the size of its
current data center in Kristiansand in southern Norway to a
capacity of around 2,000 megawatts (MW) of power consumption, to
provide services to large customers including oil and gas firms.
It also plans to connect the data center with Denmark, Ireland
and the United States as part of a transatlantic subsea cable
project, Havfrue, jointly developed by Bulk, Alphabet's Google,
Facebook and Aquacomms, which is expected to be completed by the
end of 2019.
"The goal is to use Norway's huge surplus of renewable energy to
power data centers to process large volumes of data, including
for the oil and gas industry," Naerboe told Reuters.
Oil and gas production accounts for about 40 percent of the
Nordic country's exports, and its largest firm Equinor -
formerly known as Statoil - is seeking to digitalize its
offshore installations to increase efficiency.
Separately on Wednesday, Microsoft announced plans to build two
new data centers in Norway, as part of an agreement with Equinor
to provide cloud services to the oil and gas firm.
(Editing by Terje Solsvik and Mark Potter)
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