French international banking organization, BNP Paribas, has announced its plans to relocate additional portions of its international IT infrastructure to atNorth’s data center in Stockholm, Sweden. The move is aimed at increasing the banking organization’s grid computing capacity (by 20 percent) and supporting its commitment to economy, ecology, and carbon neutrality.
AtNorth is a pan-Nordic colocation, high-performance computing (HPC), and artificial intelligence (AI) service provider that has been serving BNP Paribas for an extended period of time. The relocation of some of its IT tasks to the Nordic region would enable BNP Paribas to handle the increasing demand for high-performance, data-intensive IT tasks.
BNP Paribas has been updating and expanding its High-Performance Computing (HPC) server farm, which is a critical node for applications used to calculate the positions and associated risks in the financial markets. The relocation of its IT workload to atNorth’s data center in Sweden is part of the banking organization’s program to future-proof its IT infrastructure responsibly and lower its carbon impact across the entire global company.
According to an atNorth statement, the initial relocation of BNP Paribas’ IT infrastructure to Iceland in 2018 resulted in an increase in overall capacity by almost 30%, a reduction in energy use of more than 50%, and an 85% reduction in CO2 production. This success has led the banking organization to continue its partnership with atNorth and relocate additional tasks to its Swedish data center.
Generating Heat and Hot Water for Neighborhood
Alexis Carrion, CIB Global Head of Data Centers at BNP Paribas, stated, “atNorth has been instrumental in helping BNP Paribas ensure our IT operations are as sustainable and carbon neutral as possible, which is an initiative close to the core of our business at the moment.”
The atNorth site would be the obvious solution for BNP Paribas as it looks to increase its grid computing capacity while adhering to its guiding principles for sustainability and efficiency.
AtNorth’s data center in Sweden is among the most energy-efficient in the country and was designed for thermal recuperation. The data center is built to have as little of an environmental impact as possible. Up to 85% of the energy used in the center can be used on-site to generate heat, which is then transferred to the central district heating system to generate heat and hot water for the neighborhood. This innovative application of extensive heat recovery advances the cyclical economy and exemplifies a new wave of data center architecture.
As a Pan-Nordic data center services provider, atNorth provides high-performance computing and colocation services throughout Finland, Sweden, and Iceland. A sixth site will open in Akureyri, Iceland in Q2, 2023, and a seventh site will open in Finland in 2024. Headquartered in Reykjavik, Iceland, the business currently runs five data centers in key sites throughout the Nordic region.
