Copenhagen, December 6 (EFECOM).- Norway is experiencing a boom in data center construction thanks to cheap and renewable energy and the climate that has allowed the country to be at the forefront of the Nordic and European markets and attract large multinational technology groups.
Among them are Google, which has invested 600 million euros in a center in Skien (south), with an initial capacity of 240 megawatts, which it plans to open next year, and OpenAI, which announced a few months ago the construction of its first data center in Europe in Narvik (north), with an initial capacity of 230 megawatts, in which 1,000 million (861 million euros) will be invested.
According to a study by Research and Markets, the Norwegian data center market could reach a value of almost $2.8 billion (€2.4 billion) in 2030, up 80% from last year.
Companies and experts agree that they cite several key factors, such as the climate that naturally cools servers, the abundance of renewable energy, low electricity prices, and the use of energy-efficient technologies.
“What has really activated and expanded data centers in Norway is the boom in artificial intelligence, which is affecting the entire industry. They consume much more than the old centers and that has increased the focus on energy prices and availability,” Jørn Skaane, managing director of Lefdal Mine Center (West), explains to EFE.
Norway also has renewable energy, particularly hydropower and wind power, which are cheaper and available in greater quantities than other European countries.
The Lefdal Mine Center is located in a former olivine mine in a mountain with 120,000 square meters on four levels and features an innovative cooling system using ice water from the adjacent Nordfjord, surrounded by hydropower and with minimal network losses.
Some of the idea’s proponents had deployed this solution on a smaller scale in a small data center more than a decade ago and developed a similar project for Lefdal in 2010, but it was only five years ago, coinciding with the AI boom, that they managed to secure the necessary funding.
“We were in the middle of a perfect storm,” Skaane summarizes, explaining how they landed two big customers: the Olivia supercomputer, a public research project, and Mercedes-Benz.
While its other Nordic neighbors began attracting data centers more than a decade ago, Norway appeared to lag behind, weighed down by its poorer connectivity and a less favorable business climate than Sweden, Denmark or Finland.
In 2018, the then right-wing Norwegian government promoted an initial digitalization plan that reduced the electricity tariff for large data centers and exempted them from paying wealth tax.
Last June, the current Labor Board presented a new strategy based on safety, sustainability and the creation of value in local communities, which also promotes the creation of a register to control a sector in continuous expansion.
“Norway must be the most digitized country in the world by 2030, and data centers play an important role in this,” said Digitization Minister Karianne Tung, summarizing the plan.
Good conditions in Norway have sparked a race to build more data centers and expand their performance.
The Lefdal Mine Center, for example, currently has 80 megawatts, but has already requested an additional 120 megawatts from the state operator Stattnet, although, according to Skaane, it could use 400 megawatts and sell it easily because the demand is “enormous”.
Google has received 240 megawatts, but wants to expand this to 840, a trend that also applies to other data centers in this country, which increased their consumption by 50% in the first half of this year, equivalent to 1% of Norway’s total.
According to Stattnet data, almost 44% of all projects “queued” for larger capacity are data centers, a figure that Socialist Party energy spokesman Lars Haltbrekken recently described as “madness.”
Both the Socialists and the ex-Communists of Rojo, two small forces allied with Labor, are defending greater control over the centers and warning of the danger of a rise in electricity prices for consumers.
According to a recent study by Bloomberg Intelligence, electricity consumption by data centers in Norway could quadruple by 2032, which would inevitably have an impact on citizens’ wallets.
“It could affect the price of electricity a little, but not too much, because the Nordic countries form a single market. And if we say we don’t want to build more data centers in Norway, they would probably build them in Denmark or Finland, and prices would go up anyway,” argues Skaane.
Socialists and former communists are backing a proposal from the Centrist Party, another Labor ally, to increase electricity tariffs for data centers, while the government has imposed a temporary ban on those dedicated solely to cryptocurrency mining. EFECOM
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