Renewable energy drives Norwegian market

The Norwegian leased data centre market is set to grow by nearly 100MW by 2024, according to a new report released by CBRE Data Centre Solutions Consulting. That would take total market supply to 216MW for both retail and wholesale colocation.

The surge in new supply is due to a number of factors that are unique to Norway’s data centre offering. The market continues to be driven by enterprise and cloud deployments with companies benefitting from access to renewable and low-cost energy supply.

Many of the deployments include high-density use cases such as artificial intelligence (AI) compute and high-performance computing (HPC) which require large amounts of processing equipment and power. In a number of cases companies are able to move these functions where they don’t involve sensitive data into lower-cost locations and this is driving international interest in the market.

The Norwegian leased data centre market saw 36MW of take-up in the last two years. Companies taking data centre supply included Microsoft which has deployed an availability zone to serve the Nordics. Many other hyperscalers are showing continued interest in the market, however, are yet to fully deploy their own offering.

The market is currently being driven by larger deals, with the wholesale colocation market accounting for 83% of take-up and CBRE predicts it will reach above 90% in 2024.

The market has also seen healthy growth in leased data centre supply. The majority of the activity is centred around Oslo, where low latency connectivity is best served. Other HPC environments are located outside of the city where land is widely available alongside good power provision.

CBRE EMEA Data Centre Solutions Consulting Analyst Henry Gray said the industry continues to see large scale deployments, particularly from European businesses that are able to decentralise parts of their operation.

“Historical latency issues are becoming less of a constraint and the continued investments from data centre operators is placing Norway in an extremely competitive position with neighbouring markets,” Gray said.

“Power is still the main attraction to the market where cost saving and environmental, sustainability and governance (ESG) targets can be met with ease. Our figures are just starting to tell the story of the real importance of green energy in the data centre industry.”