Vattenfall launches sustainable data centre pilot

Swedish state energy company Vattenfall has partnered with Germany’s Cloud & Heat Technologies to launch a pilot project for a sustainable, high-speed computing capacity data centre at a biomass plant outside Stockholm. 

The energy company and the German eco-data centre have installed two data centre containers at Vattenfall’s biomass-fired district heating plant in Jordbro, south of Stockholm. The plant is equipped with high-end servers in order to cater for Artificial Intelligence and High-Performance Computing applications. It is also designed to offer high performance, security, and direct utilisation of excess heat in the adjacent district heating plant process for highest sustainability. 

The facility will draw power from the combined heat and power (CHP) biomass plant. It will send excess heat to the local district heating network. The containers will offer Cloud&Heat’s Machine-Learning/Artificial intelligence stack, the company said in a statement. 

“The demand for high-performance and low-cost computing capacity is increasing rapidly, especially for Internet of Things & Artificial Intelligence applications. Our new data centre at our pilot site in Sweden is ready for operation for customers expecting cost-efficient, reliable, and fossil free computing capacity,” said Birger Ober, Project Manager at Vattenfall in the statement. 

The service provided by Cloud & Heat Technologies is a full-service Machine-Learning/Artificial intelligence stack. The German company partnered with the Norwegian firm Earth Wind & Power (EWP) to develop HPC infrastructure located within energy sites and pipelines. 

Given the increasing importance and demand of green IT, Cloud & Heat Technologies and Vattenfall aim at enhancing this project and providing more prospecting solutions to promote further sustainable data infrastructures. 

“Cloud & Heat Technologies provides energy-efficient, scalable, and secure tailored high-density infrastructure solutions, which meet the requirements of the future. Vattenfall’s expertise and Cloud&Heat’s technology allowed the erection of a water-cooled data centre that emits zero CO2 during its operation and in addition, is directly integrated in Vattenfall’s heat network for direct heat reuse,” said Dr. Jens Struckmeier, CTO at Cloud & Heat Technologies. 

The companies announced the project in March 2020. The test system for the project will use two of Dresden-based Cloud&Heat’s liquid-cooled 20 foot containers equipped with 1,600 high-performance graphics cards. 

Cloud & Heat Technologies provides modular data centres that can connect to district heating schemes. The recently founded EWP provides modular data units for fossil, wind, and solar plants to use the excess energy to power HPC or blockchain infrastructure.