The Arktika data center project was presented at the International aummit of the Association of data center industry participants by Sergey Nemchenkov, general director of Atomdata Center, director of the department for management and business development of the data center of Rosenergoatom (part of the Electric Power Division of Rosatom State Corporation).

The event, the general partner of which was Rosenergoatom, took place in Murmansk and brought together more than 160 representatives of data centers, cloud providers, large corporate sector companies, system integrators and equipment suppliers from different regions of the country and the CIS countries. The venue for the summit was not random -the construction of data centers can become one of the real drivers of the development of the Arctic.

The new data processing center (DPC) of Rosenergoatom, which is planned to be built by 2023 at the site of the Kola NPP, will become the basic infrastructure for new digital platforms and services of the Northern Sea Route and the Arctic zone, necessary to provide logistics, manage smart city services, as well as supporting tourism and other important areas of the region development. Besides, the Arktika DPC will be the supporting engineering infrastructure for the Kola NPP itself, taking into account the plans for the construction of the Kola NPP-2.

“Today, the deployment of computing power beyond the Arctic Circle is a necessary solution. As for the Kola NPP, the availability of excess energy capacity and low electricity tariffs became significant factors in favor of the construction of the Arktika data center on this site. In addition, a key comparative advantage of these data centers consists in the free cooling provided by the climatic realities of high latitudes. It is possible to achieve significant savings on air conditioning,” Sergei Nemchenkov said.

The Arktika DPC is included in the program for creating a geo-distributed disaster-proof network of data centers and infrastructure sites of Rosatom and is designed for 48 racks with a total capacity of 1 MW. By the end of 2022, it is expected to develop design and estimate documentation for it and start manufacturing equipment, as well as perform the necessary preparatory work on the site and engineering networks of the data center.

At the moment, three data processing centers of Rosenergoatom are already operating in different regions of the country: the Kalininsky data center in the Tver region, the Xelent data center in St. Petersburg and the StoreData data center in Moscow. Five more data center construction sites are under development in different regions of the country.