Sweden will use the heat from data centres to warm thousands of homes in the district of Kista.
Sweden's capital city, Stockholm, will provide tax breaks to data centre operators, to encourage cloud and Colocation firms to set up shop in its new environmentally-friendly business parks.
The city has set out plans to build a renewable energy-powered data centre hub in Kista, with the waste heat used to warm local residents.
A consortium has been established with several infrastructure companies from the region (Fortum Värme, Ellevio and Stokab), which will operate as Stockholm Data Parks, providing the power, cooling, heat recovery and the dark fibre networking capacity needed to make the project possible.
Work on the 60,550m2 site will begin this year.
The project is one of three builds planned for the Stockholm Data Parks initiative, with two further sites, covering a combined area of 220,000m2, already planned for 2018 in other parts of the city.
The initiative coincides with the Swedish government’s decision to roll out energy tax breaks for data centre operators which began on January 1, 2017.
Under the terms of the deal, new and existing Swedish data centre operators will benefit from massive cuts to electricity bills provided their facilities exceed 0.5MW of capacity.