Helgi Helgason’s footsteps echo along the deceptively quiet white corridor: on the other side of the wall, thousands of computers sizzle day and night. “ They are high performance computing machines, he explains. They carry out crash test simulations or other for our customers, such as BMW or Volkswagen. “ He opens one of the doors and invites you to follow him on tiptoe.
Inside, the din, like an army of buzzing beehives, is quickly unbearable. A breeze of cold air filtered from the outside streams between the shelves, where the supercomputers pile up. The hot air they produce is drawn in by a ventilation system and expelled outside. “Several of our customers share this hall, but the previous one is reserved for one of them. Even I don’t have the right to enter ”, adds Helgi Helgason, while pulling up the zipper of his jacket. To reach the other building, a huge hangar covered with beige tin, he must face the torrential rain of the Icelandic autumn.
Fifty to one hundred people, employees and subcontractors, work every day here, on the 18 hectares of the Verne Global site, the first data center (data center) built in Iceland. Work began in 2007: a year earlier, the land was still occupied by an American military base. This was the economic heart of Reykjanesskagi, the “peninsula of the cape of fumes”, about forty kilometers from the capital, Reykjavik. “Its closure, two years before the financial crisis of 2008, had exploded the local unemployment rate to nearly 20%: a trauma”, recalls Helgi Helgason, Managing Director of Verne Global. Today, the ultra-secure enclosure no longer houses Air Force combat aircraft, but high-tech equipment. A symbolic rebirth, illustrating the new credo of the Icelandic economy: data centers.
The volcanic island already has four large ones, offering their high performance computing services (in English, HPC for High Performance Computing) to several client companies, mostly from industry, research and services. “ This is the niche in which we have specialized ”, explains Einar Hansen Tomasson of Business Iceland, the agency responsible for promoting the country to foreign investors. Its slogan, “Iceland is the coolest destination for data centers”, plays on both meanings of the word “cool” in English: nice and fresh.
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