In 2006, Peder Nærbø founded Bulk with a mission to address Oslo’s winter air quality issues. Oslo’s unique geographical location—at the end of a fjord and surrounded by mountains—often led to smog due to fossil fuel heating and traffic congestion when the wind wasn’t blowing. To combat this air pollution, Nærbø wanted to strategically zone land outside the city centers to move logistics and to develop more modern and energy efficient facilities.
Finding the right land, with all the protected farmland and recreational forest surrounding Oslo, proved to be a challenge, but this specialization became Bulk’s forte. In a short span, Bulk emerged as the leading industrial real estate developer in Norway.
From Logistics to Data Centers
In 2010, Bulk was approached by its first visitors wanting to locate large land for data centers in Oslo. Several scouting visits yielded no results, and they were not transparent about what they needed, so Nærbø decided to delve deeper into the data center industry. He recognized the synergies with Bulk’s existing real estate business and saw an opportunity to unlock Norway’s vast surplus of renewable energy for this sector—and Bulk would be ideally positioned for the task.
The initial hesitancy of scouts to choose Norway as a data center destination likely stemmed from the absence of dark fiber as a product in the country. Norway was connected through the “Scandinavian Ring,” a fiber and duct network linking the Nordic capitals Oslo, Copenhagen, and Stockholm, but it offered limited route diversity and legacy telecom operators with mostly lit services as products.