Former Global Switch Executives Launch Astor to Build Edge AI and Cloud Data Centers Across OECD Markets

Former executives of Global Switch, the London-headquartered wholesale data center operator, have launched a new venture called Astor that will develop powered land and multi-tenant edge data center facilities targeting AI and cloud workloads, the company announced this week. The new business is backed by Margaux Platforms, a London-based private market investment firm, and will focus on developed OECD markets where demand for distributed compute capacity is outpacing the ability of traditional infrastructure to keep up.

Astor will develop what it describes as "shovel-ready" powered land sites equipped with flexible reference designs capable of supporting the full spectrum of modern computing workloads. The company's data center projects will be high-efficiency colocation facilities specifically engineered to overcome the "last-mile" obstacle of delivering IT capacity close to end-users in grid-constrained locations. These will be metropolitan facilities with less than 100MW of capacity, positioning Astor in the growing segment of edge and near-edge infrastructure that sits closer to population centers than the hyperscale campuses that have dominated recent industry investment.

The company said it will concentrate on projects in developed OECD countries, pointing to Europe in particular as a market that lags significantly behind the United States. According to Astor's announcement, Europe is "three to five years behind the US in AI and cloud penetration," a gap that the company argues poses a direct challenge to the continent's economic and digital sovereignty ambitions. "Cloud penetration, aging grid infrastructure and lengthening power connection queues increasingly pose a threat to Europe's economic and digital sovereignty ambitions," the announcement said.

The new business is led by Elliot Dittes, formerly Global Switch's global head of project delivery and engineering, who will serve as chief executive. He is joined by a number of former Global Switch executives, bringing deep operational and development experience from one of Europe's largest wholesale data center platforms. "The next phase of digital growth demands agile infrastructure that can be delivered quickly even as access to grid power becomes more constrained," Dittes said. "Astor meets this challenge by unlocking capacity where it's needed most with best-in-class design solutions that adapt to environments and evolving compute workloads for the world's critical technologies of scale."

The launch reflects a broader industry shift toward smaller, more agile data center formats as power availability, grid congestion and lengthening interconnection queues increasingly constrain the buildout of large-scale facilities in dense urban markets. By targeting sub-100MW metropolitan sites in grid-constrained locations, Astor is betting that demand for low-latency compute — driven by AI inference, cloud services and edge applications — will favor operators that can deliver capacity quickly and close to end-users, rather than those reliant on remote hyperscale campuses. The involvement of Margaux Platforms signals continued investor appetite for niche infrastructure platforms that can address specific bottlenecks in the AI and cloud supply chain, even as competition for powered land and grid connections intensifies across Europe and other developed markets.