AtlasEdge dedicated to digital finance

19 May 2026 – Article by PFI

Roeland Hooikammer had been at Liberty Global for more than a decade by the time he jumped over to become vice-president of capital markets and financial planning and analysis at data centre developer AtlasEdge in February. By Hazel Sheffield.

PFI spoke to him a few weeks into the new role – the first time AtlasEdge has had a dedicated person to securing financing and someone who speaks the same language as the bankers on the deals. The appointment comes as AtlasEdge shifts its strategy to drill down in fewer, larger locations, after the sale of nine data centres to Templus in May. Partly that’s a preference for scale: AtlasEdge CEO Tesh Durvasula has said it’s unlikely the company would consider any projects less than 12MW at this stage. But operating in 12 markets is more challenging than focusing on four or five of them from a relationship standpoint, Hooikammer says, especially in terms of relationships with salespeople and construction firms: “We need to focus on what we are good at: a couple of markets where we see a lot of demand.”

AtlasEdge was formed in 2021 when telecoms company Liberty Global brought its real estate portfolio together with the assets of digital infrastructure fund DigitalBridge. At the outset, AtlasEdge took on Liberty Global’s data centres. That gave the new company a big digital footprint and access to many different markets and customers. But in the five years since, it has homed in on a slimmer structure. In the Templus deal, AtlasEdge sold sites in Madrid, Barcelona, Milan, Zurich, Paris, Amsterdam, London, Leeds and Copenhagen, marking a shift away from some of Europe’s most overcrowded city hubs. Instead, the company is turning its focus towards secondary markets where AtlasEdge sees rising demand for digital infrastructure and the potential to scale: Hamburg, Lisbon and Vienna.

Underneath the shift in appetite is the changing distribution of AI workloads, away from centralised clusters where capacity is increasingly strained. In big city centre locations, the company has seen competing demands from smaller and more diverse customers, comprising small and medium enterprises and local businesses. AtlasEdge has observed that customers in regulated sectors like defence and government are seeking greater data sovereignty and a more distributed network of centres with lower latency and greater resilience. 

By focusing on scalable, secondary locations, AtlasEdge can appeal to companies that want to process data closer to the end user at a moment when demand for AI and cloud computing is growing. From the company’s perspective, bringing in bigger tenants achieves diversity and stability at the same time – an advantage when appealing to banks that want stable returns and low churn. Increasingly that means not just the hyperscaler with a 15-year lease, Hooikammer says, but banks and established global firms like Volkswagen and Mercedes-Benz.

Two markets are at the core of the strategy – the Dach region of Germany and Central Europe, and the Iberian Peninsula. In these markets, AtlasEdge is expanding three major projects: a 42MW development in Vienna that the company believes to be a key gateway for Central and Eastern Europe; sites orbiting five of the six biggest city economies in Germany; and a 32MW Lisbon campus, where the plan is to invest more than €500m. 

In October, AtlasEdge secured a €253m seven-year term project finance bond issue to back its Lisbon schemes in a deal underwritten by ING and Santander. The deal is split into a €63m tranche for the construction of the 5MW LIS001 and a €190m tranche for the construction of the 16MW LIS002. “There was quite a bit of demand in Lisbon and landing cables from both the US and Africa,” Hooikammer says. “Location wise, it makes a tonne of sense to be there.”

Durvasula has said the Lisbon campus is the cornerstone of the company’s Iberian strategy, sitting at the heart of one of the fastest growing markets in southern Europe. The campus is unusually close to the city, surrounded by universities and a large, educated population. AtlasEdge has received political support from the mayor and deputy mayor of Oeiras, and benefited from Portugal’s favourable tax environment. 

The financing began a couple of years ago, when AtlasEdge acquired some land positions in Lisbon and contacted Hooikammer in his previous position at Liberty Global, alongside a counterpart at DigitalBridge, to put together a business plan for a data centre. The team got in touch with banks with which it already had a relationship. Due diligence and advisory were handled in-house, as part of the unique structure of the partnership between Liberty Global, DigitalBridge and AtlasEdge. A team of around 15 people formed to work on various parts of the deal that other developers might have had to outsource. “Why pay the adviser fee when you have one of the best advisers out there with DigitalBridge and Liberty Global? It’s an efficiency benefit.”

But more than a cost saving, Hooikammer says the group process can be very rewarding for internal stakeholders. “You get both shareholders very much engaged,” he says. “It’s very motivating for our various teams to learn from each other.” The process of working on the deal eventually led to Hooikammer’s decision to move across to AtlasEdge. “I saw it from the inside out,” he says. 

Within six months, ING and Santander came onboard as underwriters on the deal. A further four banks came in during syndication, including a local bank. “We’re very happy to have a local bank in there, because those are the relationships we try to build,” Hooikammer says.

While securing financing with two banks can provide complications, Hooikammer was able to bring his experience working on previous deals with multiple counterparts, including the formation of Virgin Media O2 in 2021 as a joint venture between Liberty Global and Telefonica, and the Nexfibre partnership between Infravia Capital Partners and Liberty Global and Telefonica backed Opal JVco Limited – both of which required negotiations between as many as 20 banks. Those experiences have given Hooikammer an appetite for big, complex deals. 

“That’s the part I love. Managing the stakeholders, getting them on the same page and then doing the financing,” he says. But on the Lisbon deal, rather than the counterparts, it was the nature of working in a new jurisdiction with Portuguese regulations that took time. “They have a different structure, bond versus loan,” Hooikammer says, “but otherwise it was fairly straightforward.” Local structuring rules meant the Lisbon deal was structured as a bond rather than a loan. Amortisation is backended. 

The mix of debt and equity on the deal was decided by two things – how much AtlasEdge could afford, and to what extent the banks agreed with that view. “In general in the market, the better the offtaker, the more debt you can secure,” he says. Hooikammer says there was a strong pipeline, including a hyperscaler, which helped with financing.

LIS001 is now 50% occupied with a mix of tenants including large enterprises, international global carriers and the hyperscaler. Hooikammer says that banks on these deals are beginning to view the diversification of tenants as positive during financing. “Modelling-wise, it’s not that complicated. You can plot it along the same metrics [as a 15-year contract with a hyperscaler], the only thing is that you might take a view on renewal, repricing and revolving risk, but that’s based on quite a bit of data.” 

There are plans to build at least two more centres on the Lisbon site. Hooikammer says AtlasEdge has an advantage in the market because it builds and operates data centres for itself, allowing it to keep all options open for tenancies and usage for as long as it is feasible. The company has seen how the ability to scale has become increasingly important to the customer, who won’t buy 2MW unless they can scale up to 4MW. 

“The way you make these sites successful is you build them in a way that you can go down two or three routes, depending on the customers you get. Because if you limit yourself, you’re only ever chasing after one type,” he says.

Prior to working on the Lisbon deal, Hooikammer worked on AtlasEdge’s inaugural project financing, a €725m corporate-style seven-year facility in April 2023 that funds its existing asset base, M&A deals such as the DC1 deal in Germany and pays for brownfield expansions. That deal is split into a €525m term loan and an €200m accordion.

While the funding requirements for the greenfield financing in Lisbon were clear from the outset, the accordion feature was a useful element in financing the brownfield expansion in Germany since it wasn’t clear at the start what the capital requirements of potential projects on the site four or five years down the line would be. “I don’t want to pay for all that debt day one, but if there is demand, we might want to build out quicker, and then I can raise the accordion,” Hooikammer says. It remains untapped.

In April, the company said it would be expanding its presence in the Rhineland region with the development of LEV002, a new data centre in Leverkusen with 4.4MW of capacity, powered entirely by renewable energy. The project has been designed for AI and higher capacity workloads and is expected to come online in the second half of 2027. It follows the success of LEV001, which is nearing full capacity. 

AtlasEdge has doubled the size of its German business in a little over a year, Durvasula has said, and the provider is on track to double it again over the coming year and a half. It operates in Dusseldorf, Stuttgart, Lebkuchen, Berlin, Munich – but not Frankfurt, true to its strategy to home in on secondary markets. The company is looking for more land in Germany and Austria.

Hooikammer says that Europe is catching up after a year in which demand was disproportionately focussed on the US. “That’s where the AI trend started, so it happened first there,” he says, noting that power availability and capacity offered greater visibility to customers than in Europe. “But in the second half of last year there was good re-engagement with the European market.” 

Hooikammer attributes the shift to three trends: first, the demand for data centres to be situated nearer end users, especially among government clients, but also enterprise and hybrid customers. Second, some customers are voicing increasing concerns about security, fuelling demand for greater sovereignty. Finally, many European countries improved the process for connecting power and approving planning for data centres as part of the shift towards prioritising European infrastructure. “2026 is shaping up to be an active year, in line with expectations because we saw it happening, but I would almost say beyond expectations. The sales pipelines are strong and that’s very supportive.”

While the market is “competitive”, according to Hooikammer, it’s the relationships that developers like AtlasEdge build with banks over the long term that make a difference when it comes to financing projects – a relationship that is grounded in the track record of its two sponsors.

”I’ve known these bankers for 12 years,” Hooikammer says of the counterparts on the Lisbon deal. “Banks move where they can make money, obviously, but at least as important are the relationships they build and that they know you’re there for them long term. That’s the support we get from these banks when building AtlasEdge.” 

This article was first published in PFI. Read the original article here.