Snowhorn raises $13m for ‘sustainable’ data centre company

Snowhorn raises $13m for ‘sustainable’ data centre company

Josh Snowhorn (2).png

Former EdgeMicro, CyrusOne and Verizon executive Josh Snowhorn has raised an initial US$13 million in seed funding for his new data centre project.

The start-up, Quantum Loophole, will be based in Austin, Texas and aimed for “highly sustainable, environmentally-sound data centre developments at scale”, said the company.

Snowhorn (pictured), who left CyrusOne in 2018 and stayed with EdgeMicro only two years, said: “We have re-imagined the way data centres can be developed in concert with natural resources for sustainability within the industry and our planet.”

The team includes CTO Scott Noteboom, former VP of operations at Yahoo and head of global infrastructure at Apple, and Sylvia Kang as VP of real estate, formerly with Yahoo, Microsoft and CyrusOne.

VP of sustainability is Oren Wool, formerly of California’s Sustainable North Bay, who says on LinkedIn: “Quantum Loophole is deploying gigawatt scale data centre communities connected by millions of strands of fibre, meeting the needs of the cloud today and into the future. Our adaptive, modular design, optimized for low water use, low waste and low embodied energy, powered by 100% renewable energy, will help our customers achieve their operational, financial, and environmental goals.”

Snowhorn said the company’s plan is to incorporate “an ethically-planned and community-centric design that puts sustainability at the forefront”. Its master plan is to have “data centre cities [that] are designed to offer gigawatt levels of critical power, leverage cutting-edge technology to deliver connectivity seamlessly and immediately, and offer mass scale fibre to nearby networking hubs”.

Quantum Loophole said that its first development project is well underway, but details would not be revealed until the third quarter of the year.

Snowhorn said: “All the while, our approach to shared infrastructure and pre-planned site approvals improves performance, expedites time to market, while solving for the expediency and scalability large capacity data centre operators require well into the future.”

In 2018, when he left CyrusOne he posted on LinkedIIn that EdgeMicro would focus on “micro colocation and interconnection at the mobile edge for content, mobile network operators, IOT, automotive telemetry, gaming and any other industry that needs to deliver bits at the lowest latency possible”. He told Capacity that he would "be guiding the company's strategy especially with product rollout, content company strategy and an overall guide to connectivity and interconnection at the sites." 

A year later, he explained in another Capacity interview: “My history is in giant data centres. The edge is different: the big thing is content. The content guys are looking at those markets where there are no internet exchanges – places such as Houston and Dallas, no peering or interconnection.”

 

 

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