On Tuesday, TerraScale, a founder-led, California and Nevada-headquartered startup in “sustainable computing” infrastructure, announced that it plans to merge with Swiss battery technology company iQ International AG. The combined entity, which will continue under the TerraScale name, will be listed in Frankfurt, positioning itself as a “green” player in digital infrastructure development, renewable energy, clean power management and cybersecurity.
After the deal, pending joint shareholder approval, the merged company will be led by TerraScale founder and CEO Danny Hayes, and chaired by Lt. Gen. (Ret.) Michael Barbero (who previously led the U.S. Defense Department’s Counter-IED, improvised explosive device command, formally called JIEDDO).
TerraScale plans to put significant resources behind its flagship initiative, Project Energos, a global plan to design, develop, finance, build and manage resilient, sustainable data infrastructure. Project Energos aims to deploy 20 or more data centers globally over the next 5 to 10 years, with anticipated groundbreaking on its Los Angeles data center planned for March 2022.
The Green Cloud
“Over the past decade, we have seen many new concepts entering the data center market, often related to their power consumption or power storage. While these innovations may initially have been driven by revenue goals, carbon neutrality and ESG principles have become a societal issue and should be on the mind of all responsible companies,” says Danny Hayes, CEO & Co-Founder of TerraScale.
“Our vision is to use data centers as a platform to integrate state of the art renewable energy solutions, high density compute platforms with low power consumption, and disruptive low energy cooling technologies all wrapped in iron clad cyber security solutions. We call this environment the ‘Green Cloud,'” he added.
“Many of the existing players in the data center market are either looking at the big metropolitan areas to gain connectivity, or at remote areas with clean renewable resources, but what’s missing is the innovative will to take a step back and develop a concept that ensures modern power concepts are implemented safely without the paradigm of centralization from the past,” added Kevin T. Loman, CEO & Co-Founder of iQ International. “We are bringing together longstanding engineering expertise and cutting-edge thinking to make sure power-intensive applications can be run more securely and sustainably, but also introducing new concepts of battery cyber security we believe is currently being overlooked by operators.”
“Cyber security has been one of the key challenges companies face since the beginning of networked computing. Today, there isn’t a single day without reports of data leaks, losses or other attacks,” said Col. (Ret) Mark Schonberg, President of TerraScale. “Most colocation providers leave data security fully in the responsibility of their clients, and never think about the power grid supporting their systems. Our goal is to build data centers and their power ecosystems with a military-grade cyber defense in-depth for virtual systems to provide additional protection for the customers of our Green Cloud.”
Under the terms of the agreement, which has been unanimously approved by both companies’ Boards of Directors, share ownership of the company on a fully diluted basis will be 49 percent TerraScale shareholders, 51 percent iQ shareholders.
Earlier this year, iQ International acquired U.K.-based advanced battery recycling technology company Ever Resource Ltd. (and hired its two founders), having previously signed an exclusive licensing agreement with the University of Cambridge for technology that it developed with the Ever Resource team. Specifically, Ever Resource developed technologies to upcycle spent battery paste, by converting it into a nano-structured, energy-dense leady oxide, a process that reportedly yields more energy per kilogram of battery, longer cycle life, greater depth of discharge, and less environmental impact.
