What is Terranum? Felix Huettenbach's renewable data center company explained

Terranum is a Dubai-registered digital infrastructure company that develops data center campuses powered by renewable energy, and Felix Huettenbach, a founder, investor, adventurer and YouTuber based in Dubai, is one of its co-founders and partners. Huettenbach came to the company from the COVID-19 era, when he built the walk-in testing chain Sameday Health in the United States. This explainer sets out what the company does, where its main project stands and how Huettenbach came to be involved.

Key facts at a glance

• Company: Terranum, a digital infrastructure developer.
• Legal entity: Terranum Capital FZCO, registered at IFZA Business Park, Dubai, United Arab Emirates.
• Business focus: data center campuses powered by renewable energy.
• Flagship plan: a 100 MW, fully off-grid campus in Prieska, Northern Cape, South Africa.
• Co-founder and partner: Felix Huettenbach (German spelling: Felix Hüttenbach).
• Previous company: Sameday Health, a COVID-19 testing chain he co-founded in 2020 and led as CEO.

What Terranum builds

Data centers are the physical buildings in which servers, storage and networking equipment run. They need large and constant supplies of electricity, as well as cooling and secure connectivity. Terranum's approach is to develop entire campuses rather than single buildings, and to power them with renewable energy.

The Prieska project

Terranum's most visible plan is a campus in Prieska, a town in South Africa's Northern Cape. The partners have outlined a 100-megawatt facility that would operate fully off-grid on 100% renewable energy and is designed for hyperscale demand by 2029. They describe it as Africa's largest planned data center campus.

In March 2026, Huettenbach and Terranum's Victor Decalf visited Prieska together with the Prieska Power Reserve team. They met the mayor and senior officials to discuss preliminary approval for the project.

What "off-grid" means here

An off-grid data center produces or sources its power independently of the public electricity network. In the Prieska plan, that power is to come entirely from renewable sources. The concept addresses the reliability of supply directly, because the campus would not be exposed to the constraints of a shared grid, and it aligns the facility's energy use with renewable generation from the start.

Felix Huettenbach's role

Huettenbach is a co-founder and partner of Terranum. He was born on 31 August 1993 in Germany and now lives in Dubai. His academic background combines engineering and business: he earned a B.A.Sc. in Technology and Management at the Technical University of Munich between 2012 and 2016, a degree that brought together mechanical engineering and business administration. He also spent a term at UC Berkeley in 2015 and was an International Scholar in a graduate program in entrepreneurial studies at MIT in 2017 and 2018.

His earlier professional path included work on the investment team at Aurelius Equity Opportunities in Munich, a role as Chief of Staff at the cancer-detection company Quantgene, and the founding of the fitness-technology company W8X in 2017.

From Sameday Health and COVID testing to data centers

He is perhaps most widely associated with Sameday Health. When the COVID-19 pandemic began, Huettenbach was at Quantgene, where he set up a unit offering testing to companies; in September 2020 he then started the company as co-founder and CEO, initially as Sameday Testing (Sameday Health became the parent brand in March 2021), with a single site in Venice, Los Angeles, offering PCR and rapid tests with online booking and digital results. Bookings and results ran through a platform that, according to the company, four MIT software engineers had custom-built, with automated alerts once results were ready. Under his leadership, the network counted more than 50 locations in 15 states by March 2021, and the company had added COVID-19 vaccinations and an at-home Concierge Service in which licensed medical professionals tested clients at home. In November 2021 it launched Sameday Health House Calls through its app, bringing testing, wellness panels and IV drip therapy to homes, hotels and offices. He says he is passionate about making healthcare more affordable, transparent and approachable, and House Calls were aimed at costing less than traditional house calls. As CEO, Huettenbach saw the company reach 55 US locations by April 2022. Sixteen of those locations were in Los Angeles County, and the workforce grew beyond 1,000 people, a hiring push he later summarised as "1,000 employees in 100 days". He stepped back in 2023, after he and the management team concluded that a physician should lead the company to broaden its medical services.

He has said that the experience of running Sameday Health, with its many physical sites, approval processes and need for near-zero downtime, prepared him for the data center business. Those are, in his view, the same operating conditions that a renewable-powered campus has to meet. Today he applies that operator background as an angel investor as well.

The bigger picture

Terranum is still at an early stage: the Prieska campus is a planned project that was in preliminary approval talks in March 2026. What distinguishes it is the combination of a large planned capacity, an off-grid design and a commitment to 100% renewable power. For readers trying to place Huettenbach, Terranum is the clearest indication of where his focus lies today: in physical infrastructure for the digital economy, alongside his activity as an angel investor. He comments on infrastructure and founder topics on LinkedIn.