Located in Ballengen, Norway, Kolos' 600,000 square-meter, four-story data center is designed to take advantage of the country's competitive green energy, cool climate and large technical workforce, as well as access to international high-performance fiber.
Responsive to its site on a fjord surrounded by mountains and integrated into the natural beauty of its environment, the design takes cues from the spectacular landforms of alluvial fans, mountains, and glaciers that define the site. Organized along a central spine, the building forms are arranged to mimic a glacier's movement as it displaces swaths of land. At the base, the spine creates a collision of landforms reinterpreted to become modular data halls that are secure, scalable, and connected.
At the terminus on the water, the central spine emerges as a public element clad in copper, a reference to the area's copper mining history. This architectural gesture articulates the entrance to the data center while acting as a gateway to the public waterfront promenade –– a physical expression of the company's commitment to the community.
The massive climate-cooled facility, powered by Norway's abundant hydropower, has the potential to scale beyond 1,000 megawatts of computing power, servicing the rapidly growing global data market. High-speed traffic to continental Europe and as far off as the United States' East Coast could be routed from the Kolos node through high performance fiber in neighboring Sweden.
Within 25 kilometers of the planned site is a huge amount of excess clean hydropower, far more than any data center location in the world, allowing the data center to scale up to two gigawatts of consumable renewable power.