The company said investment is focused on ensuring long-term availability of power and land, providing highly connected and scalable sites.
Executive VP Gisle Eckhoff (pictured) said “We are experiencing rapidly increasing demand for our data centre capacity in the Nordics, and our ongoing expansion will provide customers with sustainable, reliable and highly connected facilities.”
Rob Elder, the company’s VP of data centres, said the plans came at the time that “Europe is in the midst of an energy crisis that encompasses price, power security and scalability”.
Eckhoff said: “While our data centres are powered by renewable energy, we still have a responsibility to ensure that energy is utilised as efficiently as possible, including solutions for re-use of heat from the cooling systems. At NO1 we have established a circular economy campus, where the heat will be re-used to heat greenhouses for vegetables and plants as well as for drying firewood. Our customers care for the environment and appreciate that Bulk is ahead in the field of sustainable data centre operations.”
Elder said: “The growth of digitalisation often appears at odds in the current climate, to both reduce demand on the grid and reduce carbon emissions of data centres. Customers cannot wait years and with these projects we continue to demonstrate how Bulk is leading the way in investing in sustainable solutions, which offer customers high connected scalable options at much lower costs to Europe and with almost unlimited scale.”
Bulk said its onsite substation – delivering 125MVA of dual connections to the adjacent Kristiansand substation – gets power from “nearby large-scale hydroelectric power plants”.
This “provides customers immediate access to 100MW of power, ensuring a resilient low carbon energy source, with significant opportunities for future scale”, said Bulk.
The power upgrade is the first part of a wider scheme that will eventually see the NO1 campus connect to 1GW of power for data centre customers.
Construction has started on a second data centre at the campus, offering an additional 10MW of IT capacity. Later this year a further 160,000 square metres of levelled land will be complete at the site, in readiness for a 40MW data centre planned for construction next year.
