Hydro66 opens worlds first 100% hydro-powered colocation data centre

Hydro66 Svenska AB, based in London UK, today announces the unveiling of a 1000 square meter 3.2MW specialist data centre facility in Boden, Sweden, which dramatically reduces the cost model for secure enterprise colocation hosting with true ultra-green credentials designed in.

The new colocation facility utilises the abundance of renewable power from the river, Lule älv, and is located beside a new 120MW substation for maximum power availability.

• The new data centre is situated next to the river, Lule älv with an installed effect of 4300 MW green hydropower, which is twice the amount of the Hoover Dam in Colorado, USA.
• The facility is fed directly from the nearby 78 MW Boden hydropower station – located only 500 metres away.
• Green power is delivered with the combination of minimum impact on the environment and extreme stability – the regional power grid has not had a power outage since 1979.
• Low average ambient temperatures in the region allows ultra-efficient free-air cooling all year round without compressors or chemicals
• The data centre is located on 2 diverse physical fibre routes with hundreds of terabits capacity and multiple telecom providers available on demand

These factors, combined with Swedish energy being the lowest cost in Europe, enables the new data centre to offer significant cost and operational advantages when compared to legacy data centres.

Andy Long, CEO of Hydro66 says, “Conducting research into current and future requirements we heard that CTO’s have four key concerns: cost, carbon footprint, security and connectivity. We decided to design a new kind of datacentre engineered to meet these requirements in a future-proof and scalable way.”

Cost: Hydro66 selected a build site in an area that provides low land costs, flexibility on space design and with hyper local access to the lowest possible sustainable long-term electricity supplies.

Carbon Footprint: Hydro66 designed an ultra-green datacentre without offsetting and utilising spare capacity local hydro-power. Hydro66 have achieved an industry leading PUE of 1.07, meaning that only 7% of total energy consumed is by non-IT equipment. This is important to consumers who are increasingly aware of the climate impact of Internet services.

Security: Hydro66 clients need long-term security of power supply, political and geographic stability, and high resilience and physical/cyber security built in, not bolted on.

Connectivity: Hydro66 recognize the mission critical importance to their clients of both electrical power and data latency. The Hydro66 data centre is redundantly connected to 2 regional power grids and a diversely routed fibre network enables 15-35ms RTT to 90% of European corporate customers.

Mr Long continues: “Data volumes and compute power requirements show no sign of slowing their exponential growth increasing pressures on IT budgets. CTO's and CFO’s need to secure data, cut costs and empower IT as a competitive differentiator. Forward thinking executives are looking at ways of optimising the cost and location of their data and we see an opportunity for a differentiated approach to legacy DC operators. With the continuing fall in bandwidth costs it no longer makes sense to rely on prime city centre locations. The biggest Internet companies have been implementing similar solutions for several years now, and Hydro66 are making web scale economics available to enterprise hosting clients for the first time.”

“We are delighted that Hydro66 are now open for business. As we see enterprise customers moving data out of their own buildings and looking for cost-effective, green and stable solutions. This broadens our offer for all types of customers demanding a wide array of competitive and sustainable solutions for their data” says Anne Graf, Investment & Development Director, The Node Pole.

Erik Svensson, CEO at Boden Business Agency comments; ”We are really excited about the Hydro66 grand opening today. Boden Business agency are proud to be a part, together with Hydro66 and all the local suppliers, of the realisation of this sustainable, ultra-green and locally produced datacentre. I think it represents a completely new way of creating future facilities today. The Hydro66 establishment has made it possible for us to create a data centre eco-system of suppliers and competence that is unique in the DC-market.”