Verne Global, a provider of sustainable data centre solutions for high-intensity computing, and Landsvirkjun, the national power company of Iceland, have announced a collaboration that will see Verne Global trial and deploy green hydrogen fuel cells to produce reliable and sustainable backup power for its Icelandic data centre campus.
The two companies will work together to enable the transition to green hydrogen power produced with Iceland’s renewable energy, which Verne Global hopes will continue to drive their sustainability credentials. This data centre project is the first of its kind in Iceland.
Verne Global’s 40 acre data centre campus was designed from the ground up to provide highly specialist data centre services for organisations running high intensity compute workloads, including AI, machine learning, high performance computing (HPC) and supercomputing. Iceland’s stable, 100 per cent renewable-powered energy grid ensures Verne Global can provide these customers with long-term price visibility, while the local climate supports free cooling 365 days a year. Through this trial project, in the unlikely event of disruption to its primary power supply, Verne Global will use renewable hydrogen-powered generation to maintain its data centre operations.
“We are really looking forward to working with Verne Global on this project and helping them further capitalise on Iceland’s inimitable ability to provide green energy,” said Hörður Arnarson, CEO, Landsvirkjun. “We are proud to undertake this pioneering project with an industry leader, which will in turn provide us with key insights into leveraging hydrogen power across Iceland and beyond.”
Icelandic New Energy, which has more than two decades’ worth of experience in hydrogen energy transition in Iceland, will oversee the project and conduct a study, which will serve to offer guidance to the wider industry on the viability of hydrogen fuel cell back-up for data centres.
“We are constantly searching for ways to improve our already market-leading sustainability credentials, so we jumped at the opportunity to work with Landsvirkjun and Icelandic New Energy to turn even our back-up data centre power ‘green’,” said Dominic Ward, CEO at Verne Global.
