PRESS RELEASE / IR RELEASE

Karl Havard joins Northern Data from Amazon Web Services and will lead the Cloud Solutions Division
 

• The industry veteran brings deep expertise in creating cloud-based enterprise solutions at some of the world’s top hyperscalers
• Karl will build a strategy that meets both short-term revenue goals and long-term business growth
• CEO Aroosh Thillainathan: “ideal candidate to bring market insight and commercial guidance to our ambitious division”

Frankfurt am Main, 14 March 2023 – Northern Data AG (XETRA: NB2, ISIN: DE000A0SMU87) today announced that it has successfully hired industry veteran Karl Havard as Managing Director of its Cloud Solutions Division.

With years of leadership experience in creating cloud-based enterprise solutions at some of the world’s top hyperscalers, Karl will bring his unique understanding of the industry to Northern Data’s Cloud Solutions Division. Most recently, he worked for Amazon Web Services as Head of EMEA GtM, AWS & Accenture Business Group, overseeing the jointly-created cloud and industry solutions and tackling customers’ biggest transformation and growth challenges. Before that, he led GFT Group's award-winning Google Cloud Alliance, earning them the Breakthrough Partner of the Year for EMEA, and helping GFT achieve over 100% revenue growth from 2019 to 2020.

Karl will be based in London and will oversee all global operations. Drawing on his experience and institutional knowledge of cloud solutions, Karl plans to build a strategy that meets both short-term revenue goals while building long-term business growth.

Northern Data’s Founder and CEO, Aroosh Thillainathan, commented: “Given Karl’s experience working with massive hyperscalers such as AWS and Google, he is the ideal candidate to bring market insight and commercial guidance to our ambitious division. Combining our cloud solution – which was designed with Accelerated Computing consumers in mind – with his knowledge and experience will allow us to build new partnerships to meet growing consumer demand. With the latest NVIDIA GPUs, we have built a cloud platform from scratch. The feedback from the POC phase last year and from our now onboarded customers clearly shows, our early anticipation of the growing appetite for European cloud compute, offered as a smart addition for the existing hyperscalers environments was right. I am very pleased to welcome Karl to the Cloud team, and herewith successfully completing Northern Data's divisional leadership."

Commenting on his new position, Karl Havard stated on his new task: “I am delighted to be joining Northern Data and being part of building the business and ensuring it takes the next big leap forward when it comes to accelerated computing. The explosive popularity of ChatGPT, HPC, and Edge computing proves AI and ML are the next evolution in the market. Northern Data had the visionary foresight to build cloud solutions in Europe, in a sustainable manner, which will enable businesses, looking to be part of the cloud revolution, to gain competitive advantage quickly. Northern Data will be bringing to market a lean stack combined with superior performance, thanks to our top-of-the-line hardware. I couldn’t be more excited to join this team at this flashpoint in their development: with market demand and growth potential, we are perfectly positioned for future growth; and we will continue to expand our capability through further technology partnerships.”

Two years ago, Northern Data saw an opportunity to improve on what the market was offering and what innovators at the vanguard of data science, machine learning, and artificial intelligence would need. Having recognized a growing appetite in compute-intensive industries, Northern Data created a GPU-based cloud in Europe specifically designed to meet those needs. Today, the lean IaaS-layer is in production and has already onboarded its first wave of customers, which include both startups and larger enterprises.

Northern Data’s lean technical cloud stack empowers any size business to create the cloud environment that they need while taking advantage of immediate GPU availability in one of the largest European GPU clusters, where data sovereignty is guaranteed. In addition to offering flexible, sustainable, and secure solutions to startups, the platform was designed to complement traditional hyperscalers’ services.

Northern Data’s cloud solution offers USPs such as overcommitment-free CPU and RAM and a non-blocking network, at a transparent, competitive pricing with no hidden costs. Additionally, given Northern Data’s carbon-neutral aspirations, customers can gain superior GPU hardware at a competitive price point while also lowering their own footprint. Northern Data is proudly realizing its vision of a sustainably-powered, European-based Cloud Solution.

About Northern Data:

Northern Data firmly believes that High-Performance Computing (HPC) will — quite literally — determine what the future will hold. HPC has the power to unlock unprecedented potential and opportunities for research and development, business, and government. Our multinational organization is rapidly staking out a position of global significance in the area of GPU- and ASIC-based solutions by designing and operating efficient, green HPC infrastructures. We offer a combination of intelligent, sustainable data centers, cutting-edge hardware and self-developed software for various HPC applications. These include bitcoin mining, blockchain technology, artificial intelligence, big data analytics, IoT, and graphics rendering. The Northern Data Group currently operates custom, large-scale data centers and proprietary mobile high-performance data centers.

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