Verne Global’s Icelandic Data Centre: In Pictures

Cooled by the outside air and powered by renewable energy, the data centre in Verne’s warehouse is made from modules

Colt’s big idea with its modular data centres is to make conventional data centres – but really quickly, delivering them on site in four months.

Verne Global’s data centre at Keflavik, Iceland is the first modular data centre which Colt has built for an external customer, and the first it has shipped overseas. It is also the start of a push to make Iceland a global data hub, so Verne, Colt and the Icelandic government were very keen to show it to a group of press and analysts.

The tour showed what Colt promised – a very conventional looking data centre area, largely empty at this stage, constructed inside a large anonymous warehouse. The hall was constructed from 37 modules, each of which is somewhat larger than a shipping container, but still small enough to be driven on British roads and loaded on a freight ship.

This centre was built without any cooling except for a circulating system cooled by the outside air which in Iceland, never gets above 25C.