Confirmed: Sale of Coleraine data centre to Swiss-based tech firm

The sale of Coleraine’s data centre has been formally confirmed by the consultants who brokered the deal.

In September the Chronicle was the first to report how global tech firm Eyrce had acquired the Portstewart road facility as part of multi-million pound investment in artificial intelligence.

This week week, consultants Armason Advisory confirmed Coleraine’s Prescient Data Centre had changed hands in an off-market deal.

Armason said Prescient’s owners were looking to exit the data centre space. Eryce was looking to source colocation capacity, and rather than lease it, chose to acquire a facility it can expand into what’s described as a “full AI campus”

Jordan Mason-Hyde, CEO of Armason, said: “This deal shows demand for capacity driving sensible business decisions. Where capacity is available and a deal is there to be done, it can be, even if the traditional colocation route isn’t the desired approach”.

News of the deal was initially disclosed by a senior officer at a Causeway Coast and Glens committee meeting.

While he described the buyer only as “a software development company” it was the Chronicle which identified the firm as Swiss-based Eryce and revealed plans to install the hardware required to train, deploy, and run artificial intelligence systems.

Elected members were told of the deal because the data centre's owners are tenants at the Causeway Coast and Glens Council's Atlantic Link Enterprise Campus (ALEC).

It’s understood the new owners have plans to expand across vacant land within the business park.

And yesterday members of the council’s Land and Property sub-committee were due to receive a briefing on “an expression of interest” at the ALEC.

It’s not yet known if Eryce are the interested party because the meeting was held behind-closed-doors.

Expansion at the enterprise park site could result in the council finally realising significant benefits from a project that has, so far, fallen short of expectations.

The 16-acre Enterprise Campus was launched to great fanfare in 2017.

The only enterprise zone in Northern Ireland, it was set up with HM Treasury's blessing to attract high tech start-ups through incentives such as Enhanced Capital Allowances.

However, only one company – a data centre provider formerly know as 5NINES took up the offer.

The operators chose the site because of Project Kelvin transatlantic communications link that comes ashore nearby.

For similar reasons the council hoped additional hi-tech tenants could be attracted to Coleraine.

When the 5NINES facility was acquired by private equity firm Prescient in 2021, the data centre was still the only tenant. And it remained so when, in 2024, Atlantic Link lost its enterprise zone status.

Yet the land continues to be held on a long term lease from Ulster University that cost Causeway Coast and Glens Council a reputed £1m

The data centre’s new owners have expressed an interesting “taking over the whole site,” according to council sources, and while an expansion would be unlikely to create significant numbers of jobs, the council could be in line for a rental windfall that could be funnelled into major capital projects such as Coleraine's new leisure centre

Data centres are simply facilities housing electronic equipment used to process, store and transmit digital information.

The development of AI has prompted massive boom in their construction.

While they are seen as a crucial components in the AI revolution, their rapid expansion has raised environmental concerns - particularly around energy consumption.

On its website Eryce describes itself as “a technology group that has been designing, running and building software and infrastructure since 2010”.

At its core is “Infrastructure, AI inference and compute”, according to the firm's website.

'AI compute' is the hardware required to train, fine-tune, and run artificial intelligence.

'AI inference' is the process of running a trained AI model to make predictions on new, unseen data.