Kitebrook launches 500+ MW in Western Norway

The Men Who Built DigiPlex Are Back — and This Time, They're Thinking in Fjords
Byrne Murphy and William E. Conway, Jr. have returned to Norway with 500 megawatts of ambition, a portfolio of sites already in hand, and a design philosophy that asks a simple question: what if the mountain was the machine?
There is a particular kind of industrialist who, having built and sold something remarkable, cannot quite leave it alone. Not out of regret — the exit was clean, the valuation fair — but because the problem was never fully solved. The land still calls. The potential still nags.
Byrne Murphy and William E. Conway, Jr. are that kind of industrialist.
In 2021, the two men sold DigiPlex, the company they had spent two decades building into one of Scandinavia's most respected data center businesses. Eight facilities. Norway, Sweden, Denmark. Over 40,000 square metres of developed space, 135 employees, and a reputation for marrying digital infrastructure with genuine environmental seriousness at a time when most of the industry was still treating sustainability as a marketing afterthought. IPI Partners, the American investment firm that acquired it, paid well. Murphy and Conway walked away.
They didn't stay away for long.
In 2025, they began quietly acquiring land in Vestland County on Norway's western coast — four plots, nestled among the fjords and steep-sided valleys that define this part of the country. By early 2026, they had signed power agreements, secured development rights, and launched a new company: Kitebrook Infra. Their target is 500 megawatts of data center capacity, and they intend to build it in a way that the industry has not quite seen before.
A Problem Worth Returning For
The global demand for data center capacity has reached a pitch that makes the boom years of the 2010s look restrained. Artificial intelligence workloads have rewritten the economics of the industry almost overnight — not just in terms of power density, but in terms of urgency. Hyperscalers and enterprise customers are no longer planning in years. They are planning in months, and they are running into the same wall everywhere they look: there are not enough sites that are ready to build on now.
Ready to build, in this context, means something specific. It means land that is zoned, permitted, and connected — where the power agreement is signed, the municipality is aligned, and the construction timeline begins when the client says go, not eighteen months later. That kind of site is rare. It is, in Murphy and Conway's framing, the choke point slowing the entire industry's progress.
Kitebrook's answer is to remove the choke point entirely, one site at a time.
Their first site, in Matre in the municipality of Masfjorden, already carries a signed agreement for 30 megawatts of power, with a further 70 megawatts expected within the year. Their second, in Leirdøla in the Vestland region, has a 100-megawatt agreement underway. The remaining sites in development bring the total pipeline above 500 megawatts. These are not speculative positions on a map. They are plots with agreements, in conversations with municipalities that — according to Invest in Vestland investment manager Vidar Totland — have long been generating substantial amounts of hydroelectric power while seeing very little of the economic benefit flow back locally.
"The municipalities of Masfjorden, Samnanger, and Eidfjord have significant electricity production but have so far seen little local value creation as a result," Totland said. The arrival of Kitebrook, he suggested, changes that equation — not just in jobs and tax revenues, but in the possibility of new businesses built around surplus heat from data center operations.
What the Mountain Offers
Norway has always made a compelling case for data centers. The power is clean — hydroelectric, overwhelmingly — and there is a great deal of it. The climate is cool. The geology is stable. Submarine cables connect the country to the rest of the world with low latency. These are the facts Murphy and Conway understood when they built DigiPlex, and they remain true today.
But Kitebrook is not simply repeating DigiPlex. It is attempting something more architecturally ambitious.
In conventional data center design, backup power is one of the most expensive line items on the capital expenditure sheet. Diesel generators, the mechanical systems to support them, the chillers required to manage heat — together, they can represent hundreds of millions of euros in upfront investment for a large-scale facility. They are also, from a sustainability standpoint, an uncomfortable compromise: the infrastructure that keeps a "green" data center running in an emergency is, by definition, not green at all.
Kitebrook's proposal is to eliminate that compromise at the source.
By incorporating what the company describes as a multi-fjord solution into each facility's design — using Norway's deep-water fjords and the hydraulic potential of its mountainous terrain as an integrated backup power and cooling system — Kitebrook believes it can remove the need for generators and chillers entirely. The result, they claim, is a reduction in upfront capital expenditure of approximately €175 million for every 100 megawatts of capacity. Across a 500-megawatt portfolio, the arithmetic becomes striking.
This is not sustainability as a certificate on a wall or a renewable energy purchasing agreement signed at arm's length. It is sustainability as engineering — baked into the structure of the building, derived from the landscape around it. The mountain is not the backdrop. The mountain is part of the machine.
"With enough ingenuity and perseverance, modern AI-enabled data centers in Norway can work in concert with local communities and natural sources of energy to provide clean power and quiet operations while saving hyperscalers and other data center users hundreds of millions of euros," Murphy said in announcing Kitebrook's plans.
This is the kind of sustainability edge that cannot easily be replicated in a country without the fjords to support it.
Two Men, Two Legacies
Murphy brings to Kitebrook thirty-five years of international development experience and a particular talent for introducing American business thinking to European markets — he has done it three times, twice building companies to valuations above one billion dollars. He graduated from Harvard, holds an MBA from the Darden School at the University of Virginia, and wrote a book about his first major European venture, Le Deal, that won the Axiom Gold Medal for Best Business Memoir. He is, in short, not someone who drifts back into a market without a considered view of what he expects to find there.
Conway is the quieter half of the partnership in public profile, though not in stature. He is co-founder and co-chairman of The Carlyle Group, the Washington-based private equity giant that today manages over $470 billion in assets. Before Carlyle, he was CFO of MCI Communications. His involvement in Kitebrook is not that of a passive backer. He and Murphy built DigiPlex together, and they are building Kitebrook together.
"We had a spectacular experience in growing DigiPlex in the Nordic region," Conway said. "With the global demand for AI-enabled sites at a fever pitch, there is a shortage of ready-to-go sites, especially those with 100% sustainable power. That is why we are investing again in Norway."
What Comes Next
Kitebrook has said it intends to focus initially on Vestland County — specifically the municipalities of Masfjorden, Samnanger, and Luster — while continuing to look for additional sites across Norway. The company is also pursuing partnerships with Innovation Norway, the government body that offers grants for environmental technology development, a signal that Kitebrook sees its design innovation as something worth formalising and protecting.
Totland at Invest in Vestland has committed to helping the municipalities maximise the benefits of Kitebrook's presence — a relationship that, if it holds, could become a model for how Norwegian local government engages with the next wave of data center investment.
For Murphy and Conway, the work is familiar. The scale is larger. The design is new. And Norway, it turns out, was never finished with them either.
Further information is available at kitebrook.com.
SDC-Platform covers digital infrastructure and the data center industry across the Nordics and beyond. This article is based on information provided in a press release issued by Kitebrook Infra on 27 April 2026.