Iceland’s HPC business atNorth has begun construction work on a new US$72 million climate-positive data centre in Stockholm, Sweden.

Formerly known as Advania Data Centers, the company’s expansion into the wider Nordic region is in line with a growing trend of HPC developments in Northern Europe, especially in Norway, Sweden and Finland.

atNorth’s complex in Stockholm’s Information and Communications Technology (ICT) district in Kista will have an IT load of 11.2 MW and generate excess heat that Stockholm Exergi will use to heat local homes.

Built over seven phases, the data centre will have a total floor area of 6,400 sqm, with the first phase set to be brough online in December 2021. 

The company said in a statement that the original opening date of the site had been postponed “due to Covid-19 related delays”.

The data centre, named Stockholm SWE01: SIF DC, will include racks that can host up to 40kW air cooled infrastructure and over 100kW for liquid cooled infrastructure to meet the growing demand for large scale computing. 

The facility will provide data centre space and atNorth’s AI and HPC as a Service offerings, HPC|FLOW.

Eyjólfur Magnús Kristinsson, CEO of atNorth, said: “For atNorth, this SIF DC is a landmark project, as we are expanding beyond Iceland. Our goal is to become a world leader in high-performance computing and colocation services. 

“We are excited to bring more compute power and services to our ambitious customers. It means they can reduce cost, bring products to market faster than before and solve even more complicated problems.”

The Stockholm data centre is atNorth’s first facility outside Iceland, where the business already runs two data centres. 

These include THOR DC data centre in Hafnarfjörður, within Reykjavik’s capital region, and the MJOLNIR DC data centre in Reykjanesbær, one of Europe’s largest data centre campuses with around 80MW of power capacity.