Romanian cloud service provider ClusterPower has broken ground on its 200MW data centre campus set to become one of Southeastern Europe largest hosting sites.

The hyperscale campus, to be located in Mischii, near Craiova, Dolj County, will have up to 4500 racks and 200MW capacity and be powered with natural gas.

Five buildings are planned to be built on a ​​273,400 sqf plot of land owned by the company which will interconnect with 750 other data centres around the world.

Phase one of development centres around one of those buildings and reportedly amounts to a capital commitment of €40 million (US$46.6 million).

Last June, ClusterPower closed an initial investment round of RON 172 million (US$42.5 million) to finance the project.

Of that cash, RON 82 million ($20.2 million) was provided under a state aid granted last year by the Ministry of Finance. The remainder of the cash has been invested by other sources of financing and company funds.

To mark the breaking ground of the facility, Cosmin Georgescu, CEO of ClusterPower, addressed an audience at the University of Craiova discussing the value of data centres to Romania’s digital economy.

He said: “Romania has a lot to say in everything that means innovation, research, and digitalisation. We have many very specialised industries in the country that need the tools we will create at Mischii and I mean the supercomputer we will bring to Romania, a supercomputer similar to the one used by Pfizer to create the covid-19 vaccine.

“Such a tool can certainly be used in the Romanian pharmaceutical industry or in the field of nuclear physics or in the energy sector.”

Vladimir Ester, CTO of ClusterPower, added: “Technology has advanced enormously in recent years and is present in ​​astronomy, medicine, transportation and even agriculture. Technology is in our hand; we use it daily via the many applications we have within reach. What do all have in common? Infrastructure.

“They all need infrastructure, high processing power, telecommunications and a collaborative environment that can access this infrastructure from anywhere in the world. We have a community that wants such projects and that wants to get closer to the Western Europe or US trends, and our project in Mischii will do exactly that: it will create this infrastructure that will provide a level of interconnectivity that does not currently exist in Romania.”