Green Mountain SVG-Rennesøy (DC1-Stavanger)

The story

NATO once stored ammunition in halls carved into a mountain on Rennesøy, an island municipality near Stavanger. In 2011 an investment arm of the shipping company Smedvig, working with ErgoGroup and the utility Lyse Energi, was converting the depot into a colocation data centre; the operator gives 2013 as its build year. Six mountain halls hold two-storey concrete buildings. Cooling water flows by gravity through pipes that reach 100 metres into the fjord, where it holds at about 8 °C all year, and three grid feeds tied to hydropower plants supply electricity. In 2020 the company fitted out an empty cave as a 2.5 MW hall in under nine months. Azrieli Group bought Green Mountain in 2021.

Notable

• Cooling water flows by gravity from pipes reaching 100 m into the adjacent fjord, where it stays at about 8 °C all year.
• The main data centre is six mountain halls, each holding two-storey concrete buildings, in what was a NATO ammunition storage facility.
• Green Mountain lists 25 MW of maximum IT capacity, about 23,000 m² of space and an average PUE of 1.18 for the site.
• In 2020 an empty mountain cave was turned into a 2.5 MW, roughly 1,800 m² data hall for a cloud provider in under nine months.
• The 700 km NO-UK submarine cable to Newcastle lands at the site; Green Mountain cites 6.5 ms latency to London.

Expansions

• 2011: conversion of the former NATO depot under way; phase one planned with about 7,000 m² of colocation space
• 2020: 2.5 MW data hall (about 1,800 m²) built in an empty mountain cave in under nine months; doubling to 5 MW started
• 2021: installation of the 700 km NO-UK subsea fibre cable to Newcastle begins at the site
• 2026: UpCloud opens a cloud region in the facility