How will the Krefter data centres be cooled?

Krefter is currently developing a test centre in Lalm that will be mainly air-cooled through a newly developed air-cooling system. However, most if not all of Krefter’s future data centres will be cooled by various water systems. There are several advantages of water cooling, mainly more compressed systems that take up less space, and more opportunities for efficient reuse of excess heat. Water is a far easier source to transport heat for other purposes.

Will Krefter release hot water into the river?

Absolutely not! We do not want to disturb nature in any way, hence we will engineer our systems to release water unaffected, at the same temperature it came in, even if there are no users of the water. This will be possible through use of more water, and inner circulation systems, to cool the water down before it is released back into the river. Since the cooling systems are completely enclosed in vacuum sealed tubes, there will not be any water going away in vapour or condensation.

Will there be a lot of noise from the data centres?

Since the data centres are filled with a lot of engineers and other personnel, it is also important for us that the environment is not too noisy. Therefore, the centres are generally rather quiet. Even though it can be a bit noisy inside the server rooms, filters on walls, and security systems stops most of the noise before it leaves the building. Air-cooled systems make more noise than water cooled systems, but the difference is not too large as the buildings are well isolated.

Will there be mining at Krefter sites?

The simple answer is no. Krefter’s parent company, GT, which is the cloud computing company that offer this capacity to international clients, does not have clients that offer mining services. However, someone could rent capacity from a client of GT again, through their cloud computing platform, to then do some mining. This is something that neither us in Krefter or GT would know about.

The reason we think this is extremely unlikely, however, is that it would not be profitable. Krefter builds, develops and operates advanced, sustainable and therefore rather expensive site solutions, while GT offers the best, most secure and redundant solutions in the market. After all these extra components add up, plus the recent increase in power price and energy tax in Norway, and capacity is delivered on machines that are not optimised for mining, it would not be something that anyone could profit from.

And finally, GT does not work with smaller, individual clients such as a colocation data centre does, i.e. only a select few companies in the world would be willing to invest the billions of USD it costs to establish interconnected data centres. Krefter or GT does not discriminate against any type of industry or data centre activity, however we do not view it as likely that any mining activity will ever happen on our sites due to the reasons above.

How many workplaces will there be?

This is always a little hard to predict, but a general rule is from 0.5 to 3 employees pr. MW. Meaning a 100 MW data centre (a very large one) would have anywhere between 50 and 300 direct employees. This is a rather wide range which is mainly due to the many different requirements from clients, different business structures and requirements for specific competence rather than automation etc.

Sometimes, much of the daily operations and maintenance engineering is being done by the clients, which means they partly work remotely and travel back and forth. We do not count these as permanent employees. The ones that are always guaranteed at site are the operation technicians, electricians, network engineers and security personnel that always have to be at site 24/7.

A data centre of this size will become its own small grid company, with larger transformers and more advanced equipment than most grid companies in Norway. It will also quickly become the company with the most fiber cable and infrastructure in and out of Norway, and it will require special competence that is not really found in any other Norwegian industry today.