The hotel with empty rooms

From renewables to raised floors

Inthujan grew up in central Trondheim with his parents and little sister. His parents came to Norway from Sri Lanka and started over in a new country. They held down several jobs at once while earning their master’s degrees, and step by step built the life they wanted, for themselves and for their children.

That example set the standard at home. “For my parents, the most important thing was a good education that could lead to a safe, permanent job.”

He found his own outlet in sports, and learned to balance them with school. “Combining sport and school taught me discipline. It doesn’t just go one way.”

He earned a master’s in energy and environmental engineering at NTNU, Norway’s leading university of technology, including an exchange at UC Berkeley. The plan was to design and engineer renewable energy projects. Then a recruiter gave him advice that changed his course: don’t go straight into consulting like everyone else. Go to a contractor first, and learn how things actually get built.

So he joined Skanska, and the next contractor took him into data centers. His first look inside one in operation stuck with him. “It was overwhelming. Busbars, chillers, raised floors. I didn’t understand how it all fit together.”

The question nobody could answer

Later, working in operations, he noticed something that didn’t add up. Capacity sat available, sometimes for long periods, while demand kept rising.

Requests arrived as spreadsheets, WhatsApp messages and long email threads. A deal could go back and forth for months before anyone found out it wasn’t a match. And operators don’t want to announce what they have available, because it affects the price they can get.

That was when the idea came to him. “Why isn’t there a place where you can list it?”

“So why not build an anonymous platform, where the information isn’t publicly visible but stored securely? That was the new thinking.”

The problem wasn’t unique to his employer. “It was the same all over the world. Denmark, Sweden, but also the US and India.”

And he wanted to be the one to build it, fast. “It was now or never. Someone else could build this, and maybe do it just as well. But I came into the industry young and learned a lot. I don’t think many people can do this.”

“This is genius”

To find out if the idea was worth pursuing, he sounded it out with people who had been in the industry for years, and showed them an early version of the platform. “We had about ten meetings with players in the market, and everyone was positive. They said: you should go for this.”

Saying yes meant walking away from a job he loved: a safe and well-paid role in a fast-growing Norwegian company. With Capacity Connect, he would start from scratch. “It was very difficult and scary.”

His wife backed him from day one and took the time to get to know the market and the product he was building.

His parents were harder to convince. They had seen him land exactly the kind of secure job they had worked so hard for. Now he was giving it up for a niche industry they had no frame of reference for. “It’s not fishing or oil.” They were scared, but supportive. “They’ve never been in a position where they could leave a job and take a chance like that. We’re lucky to be born and raised in a country where that’s possible.”

Capacity Connect went live on 1 May 2026. A month later, the team met the CEO of a large European operator. “Within five or ten minutes he said: I’m in. This is genius.”

There was one problem. “We didn’t have a payment solution. We had no accounting system. We had nothing.” They built it on the spot.

Has he doubted since? “To be completely honest, not for a second.”

A hotel for servers

How does he explain Capacity Connect to someone outside the industry?

“Think of a colocation data center as a hotel, but for servers instead of people. A hotel manager wants to fill as many rooms as possible, 24/7. Data centers are the same. You want to fill the remaining capacity too.”

For buyers, the alternative is slow. “Getting a grid connection can take seven to ten years in Europe. It makes sense to find what already exists. That’s what we connect them to.”

His vision goes beyond matching. As an energy engineer, he wants the waste heat from data centers to warm homes, fish farms and greenhouses. “Use the energy twice: first to run Norway’s servers, then to heat Norway. That would be the best.”