Stockholm Data Parks welcomes first Greenfield tenant to renewably-powered datacentre hub

Green server farm operator Multigrid Data Centers is set to become the first operator to build a Greenfield facility in the Stockholm Data Parks-owned site in Kista Science City, Sweden.

As previously reported by Computer Weekly, the Stockholm Data Parks consortium made its debut at the start of 2017, with the aim of creating a renewable energy-powered datacentre hub in the Swedish city, whose waste heat would be used to warm thousands of homes in the surrounding area.

And Scandinavian operator Multigrid has emerged as the first provider to set out plans to build a 5MW, Greenfield, multi-tenanted facility on the site.

Mattias Ganslandt, CEO of Multigrid, cited the location and the conditions Kista Science City offers as major factors in its decision to set up its latest server farm there.

“Kista is Northern Europe’s largest cluster of IT companies. The combination with attractive energy prices for large-scale datacentres is quite unique,” he said.

The company describes itself as a designer of green and sustainable datacentres that provide a “Scandinavian home” for the providers of infrastructure-, software- and platform-as-a-service offerings.

At the time of writing, Multigrid is working to a go-live date of 1 January 2019 for this datacentre, and the company claims its plans are already attracting attention from both the US and European cloud provider community.

“With digitisation and the expanding use of information and communications technology, the demand for cost-efficient and sustainable datacentres is growing,” said Ganslandt. “We expect Multigrid’s new datacentre in Kista to be at least 50% more efficient than traditional facilities.”

According to the company’s estimates, the heat recovered from its datacentre will eventually be sufficient to warm up to 10,000 apartments in the local area.

“We have designed the datacentre to meet the growing demand for security and reliability,” he said. “With modern and urban architecture, the building is also designed to follow Stockholm’s intention for a sustainable and attractive city.”