The US is racking up its number of large-scale megawatt data centre campuses to accommodate the intense demands of AI customers. China is trying to keep pace, but Europe lags, a position that CEO, Wojciech Stramski wants to change for the continent to maintain a competitive edge.
“The US and China are reaping the benefits,” he says. “We need to allow our enterprises and our communities to utilise this technology as soon as possible. The longer we delay this, the more we will become users and importers of technologies developed elsewhere.”
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Stramski likens the situation in Europe to that in the early days of the railroad, during which municipalities did not want locomotives to pass through — a decision that would confine those towns to the annals of history, making them nowhere to be found on today’s maps.
“It’s the same with data centre infrastructure, especially that with high energy, high-density requirements,” Stramski says. “We need to build out data centre infrastructure in a sustainable manner and integrate it into the greater ecosystem, including energy and heat, and make it as efficient as possible.”
Beyond.pl is doing its part for the European cause: the company recently announced that its data centre campus in Poznan, Poland, is getting an upgrade, increasing its capacity to up to 150MW, enabling it to support high-density AI and machine learning workloads.
Beyond.pl’s campus is conveniently located between Berlin and Warsaw, providing customers with favourable data transfer times between those locations, as well as with other European cities such as Prague, Frankfurt and even as far as London.
“From our location, we can not only do the machine learning efficiently but also be a hub to spread and deliver use cases to customers that are being developed and users of the technology.”
Location is everything when it comes to data centres, and the home for Beyond.pl’s set-to-be-expanded site has a storied history as an innovation hub. In the 1990s, Microsoft opened an R&D hub in Poznan, with other companies following suit.
In recent years, Poznan has sought to lead the way, becoming the first Polish city to develop a digital twin. It’s also home to the Poznan Supercomputing and Networking Centre, an important R&D centre for IT infrastructure that houses Poland's first quantum computer, the ORCA Computing PT-1.
Warsaw, Poland’s capital city, is, according to Stramski, already saturated with energy issues and growth is likely to be stalled due to the lack of available capacities to expand further.
Beyond.pl’s CEO suggests the company’s Poznan site not only alleviates pressure from grids and the local environment but positions it well to serve the high-megawatt demands of the whole of Europe.
“We in Poznan feel that we have the land, know-how and power, and now we’re trying to let the market know that we are here to meet its high-density requirements,” he says.
Beyond.pl doesn’t show signs of slowing, either, with Stramski highlighting that the company has other land and real estate that it’s already planning in the pipeline around Central Europe.
Its future efforts will aim to help propel Europe forward in the global data centre market, offering international companies a way to serve customers within the EU while remaining compliant with the bloc’s various standards, including GDPR.
In Stramski’s view, Europe has a lot of catching up to do in the data centre space. And with the added concern that the continent’s demographics are dropping, there’s likely to be much more pressure on the internal market.
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Beyond.pl to expand Poznan data centre to support AI workloads
