Nordavind DC Sites offers shovel-ready building sites for carbon-neutral data centres

Industrial data centres are becoming increasingly important infrastructure for local and international IT companies. In total, they consume between 1 to 3 per cent of the world’s electricity.

Globally, most data centres get their electricity from the main grid, meaning that they are often powered by coal, gas or oil. For this reason, it is estimated that the annual emissions from the world’s data centres equal roughly those of the entire airline industry.

By establishing a data centre in Norway, where the power supply is nearly 100 per cent renewable, data-dependent companies can greatly reduce or eliminate carbon emissions.

Nordavind Data Center Sites offers shovel-ready data centre sites in Innlandet county, which is strategically situated between Oslo and Trondheim. The non-profit company is a joint venture between local municipalities, power companies, grid operators and fibre network operators. This ensures that the necessary infrastructure for building medium-sized and hyperscale data centres is in place.

Nordavind Data Centres provides dark fibre capacity to both Stockholm and Oslo, and is poised to build a new subsea fibre optic cable between Trondheim and the existing landing station in Killala Bay, Ireland. This will provide a redundant, low-latency connection to the US.

Data centres based in Norway benefit from stable political and economic conditions, as well as wholesale electricity prices among the lowest in Europe. Additionally, the cold climate ensures efficient cooling and low power consumption.

Most of the 12 sites available from Nordavind are placed in areas dominated by flat terraces built up of sand and gravel, which can reduce construction costs. Moreover, this part of Norway is less susceptible to extreme weather, winds, flooding, landslides and other natural disasters.

At some of the sites, excess heat from the data centres can be reused to heat nearby industry and homes.

As more and more governments, shareholders and customers call for greener computing solutions, the demand for data centres run on green power will continue to rise for years to come.

The number of data centres worldwide has grown from 500 000 in 2012 to more than 8 million today. The global data centre energy demand is expected to double every four years. Meanwhile, the emergence of new technologies such as artificial intelligence, IoT and big data analytics will lead to a near exponential growth in the demand for computing power.

Excellent access to fibre connections to Europe and the US, combined with sites large enough for high-performance computing centres, means that Nordavind can cater to large companies on a global scale.