In early December, Bulk Data Centers had the pleasure of welcoming the Mayor of Esbjerg, Jesper Frost Rasmussen (V) to Bulk’s Denmark Data Center Campus, DK01. The timing of the visit helped to commemorate the connection of the Havfrue subsea fiber cable to one of Denmark’s most scalable, flexible and energy efficient data center campuses.
Havfrue is the first subsea cable system in 20 years connecting Denmark with North America. This new fiber route adds diversity to a global network facing increasing congestion and challenges due to aging systems. It is an important part of Bulk’s growing fiber network connecting the Nordics with the world’s major markets via low-latency and high-capacity fiber. In addition to Bulk Data Centers, the company builds and operates international and intra-Nordic fiber infrastructure that is designed to meet the large-scale data transport needs of the future.
“We are pleased with Bulk’s successful expansion into Esbjerg and see this opportunity as only the beginning,” said Mayor Rasmussen. “We look forward to developing the relationship even further and together creating even greater awareness around our unique geographical location and hopefully be able to attract more investments from this vibrant economic sector.”
Accompanying the Mayor was Esbjerg Municipality Director Rikke Vestergaard, Business Esbjerg CEO, Susanne Nordenbaek and Head of Business, Karsten Rieder. Also joining was CBRE Critical Facilities Manager, Rune Bråten. This was the first time that the team met with Bulk since 2018, when the company first broke ground at the 50,000 square meter site.
Left to right: Rikke Vestergaard, Susanne Nordenbaek, Rune Bråten and Esbjerg Mayor Jesper Rasmussen.
Due to travel restrictions and appropriate caution, the meeting was coordinated remotely with Mayor Rasmussen’s team sitting at DK01 and the Bulk leadership dialing in from Oslo, including Bulk founder and owner Peder Nærbø. To help facilitate the meeting, Bulk DK01 staff were pleased and proud to display the company’s data center and its capabilities.
Topics of discussion included Bulk’s vision for the region and shared goals around sustainability and connectivity. Both arenas are mutual passions with each party’s aspirations perfectly aligned.
Mayor Rasmussen and Peder Nærbø held virtual discussions of their shared passions for sustainable infrastructure and global connectivity.
The visit also coincides with the one-year mark celebrating Bulk’s highly renewable and sustainable DK01 campus. DK01 leverages nearby wind power to boost data center sustainability.
“Our presence in Esbjerg with DK01, now connected with Havfrue, is so important to winning our race to bring sustainable infrastructure to a global audience,” said Nærbø. “Mayor Rasmussen and enterprises in Esbjerg and around the world recognize the need to reduce carbon emissions and are seeing this can be done cost effectively at the same time.”
Esbjerg is an energy metropole with a vast surplus of renewable wind energy from offshore wind farms along the coast of Esbjerg. These abundant renewable supplies support Bulk’s vision to deliver sustainable infrastructure to a global audience. Plans and discussions aimed at reducing the CO2 footprint even further include measures like reusing the heat from the data center to support Esbjerg’s district heating system, something that will be a possibility in the near future.
DK01 sits just 5,9 ms from Amsterdam, at the landing point for multiple subsea fiber routes, both new and legacy. It is centrally located between the FLAP markets (Frankfurt, London, Amsterdam and Paris) and the COSH markets (Copenhagen-Oslo-Stockholm-Helsinki). It is an ideal location for both an internet exchange and a fiber exchange to handle traffic among these markets while avoiding bottlenecks in Hamburg and Copenhagen. These advantages are a big part of what is attracting DK01’s current and future tenants.
Bulk’s Denmark Data Center Campus, DK01 is centrally located in Esbjerg to serve the FLAP and COSH markets, a mere 5,9 ms from Amsterdam.
Ensuring the advantages of DK01 benefit local as well as global enterprises is important to the region. To that end, Bulk has signed both Danish and international clients as tenants. It is important for the region that Bulk’s presence supports local enterprises seeking state of the art data center capabilities and connectivity to major markets. These are tremendous opportunities to avoid crowded routes that traditionally backhaul through Copenhagen en route to London or Amsterdam, for example.
Despite the unique challenges felt around the world in 2020, this past year has been one of tremendous accomplishments for the Bulk team, for their customers and partners. Powered by the abundance of clean energy resources in the Nordics, Bulk enables and supports some of the world’s most important advances in high performance computing, modeling and simulation, research and financial services through modern data centers and world class fiber optic subsea and terrestrial connectivity.
