Modern data centres need a bunch of things to operate. They need a robust perimeter so they can be secured, plentiful low-cost power, easy access to communications infrastructure and an environment that makes cooling as easy as possible. That’s why US-Norwegian company Kolos is putting thir 600,000 square metre facility in the Arctic Circle.
Accordng to the BBC, the facility will be able to take advantage of recently laid dark fiber.
The cold ambient air will help keep the place cool and there’s ready access to hydroelectric and wind turbine power meaning the facility should be able to run almost entirely on renewable energy. That’s important as Kolos expects the facility to suck in about 1000MW of energy within a decade of operation.
The four-storey data centre, which will be in the town of Ballangen, will take advantage of some of the cheapest power on the planet according to the company.
As more and more computing is outsourced to cloud providers, companies are going to look for ways to reduce their costs and carbon footprint. With IT chewing up more than 10% of the world’s power consumption and power prices rising as more countries penalise businesses using traditional power sources, we’ll see more of these developments in countries that can deliver the combination of power and connectivity.
Australia has a chance of doing this. Solar power can be part of that, as well as wind and other renewable energy sources, but we’ll need to invest in some serious communications infrastructure to locations where large facilities like this can be built.
Comments
6 responses to “World’s Biggest Data Centre To Be Built In Arctic Circle”
Ignoring for a second just how bad that sentence is, what is dark fiber? It sounds like something I should want.
Presumably it’s run on dark matter and is what runs the dark net.
Dark fiber is a well known term in networking/telco circles. It’s fiber optic cable that isn’t connected to anything (ie. unlit). Hence it’s dark fiber optic, or just dark fiber.