Investment in the Nordic data centre market has hit $3 billion (£2.2bn) over the past 18 months, while the combined power for third party facilities and hyperscales is approaching 800MW for the region.
That is the key finding from a new report by BroadGroup, whose third Data Centers Nordic report has found that the region, noted by data centre and server operators due to its naturally cooler climes, is set fair for more investment by US and Asia-based vendors.
Third party m2 space will increase by more than 26% by the end of next year, with BroadGroup saying the landscape will be ‘significantly changed’ by a variety of factors during that time, from M&A activity, to new investors, and promotional initiatives by Nordic countries.
The report covers eight countries in total. Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden are fairly obvious, but BroadGroup also assesses Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, with the three Baltic states owning 260 third party data centre facilities between them.
Plenty of reports have hit the news in recent months around investments from providers in the Nordics. Last month, a development from Kolos hit the news as being the world’s biggest data centre, build in the Arctic Circle in the Norwegian town of Ballangen. IBM is just one example of a company which has expanded to this region, building a cloud data centre in Oslo this time last year, while in Sweden a battle to give data centre providers reduced electricity rates was won late last year after new legislation was confirmed.
“Given the outlook for available renewable energy attached to greenfield and brownfield sites across the region, with more than 5500MW, the outlook for the end of 2018 and beyond is extremely positive,” said Philip Low, chairman of BroadGroup.
“As the Nordic markets are now much more integrated with Europe, existing colocation and content distribution hub opportunities, the emergence of edge [computing], fixed price contracts for renewable energy and further investment in connectivity present attractive opportunities for enterprises deploying IT assets globally.”
You can find out more about the report (subscribers) here.