German hosting company, Hetzner Online, will launch a new data center at its campus near Helsinki, Finland, at the end of 2020.

The new addition will be joining the company's Data Center Park Helsinki in southern Tuusula, 30 minutes north of Helsinki, and include four new data halls. Following the expansion, the campus will exceed 6MW and the total number of servers at the park will go beyond 100,000. Hetzner hopes to gradually fill out the campus to around 24MW in IT capacity.

Work never ends

Following the facility's opening, work on two other data centers is due to begin. According to Hetzner, the groundwork for the new facilities has already been laid and the two buildings are expected to be operational over the next few years.

The size of the Helsinki campus, once fully kitted out, could eventually reach 150,000 sq m (1.6m sq ft), with up to 20 data center units at 1.2MW each. The data centers also follow the same design philosophy as Hetzner's German facilities in Nuremberg and Falkenstein. The company chose Finland due to its cold climate and is powered by renewable wind energy supplied by Vantaan Energia.

The campus opened in 2018 and is managed by Hetzner Online's Finnish subsidiary Hetzner Finland Oy.

Joonas Terhivuo, CEO of Hetzner Finland Oy, said: “The future looks bright for data centers. Digitalization in various fields, such as the growth of data and network traffic, is likely to create demand for data center services. New technologies such as 5G, IoT, artificial intelligence, and virtual and augmented reality are driving the growth in the amount of data in data centers.”

Hetzner Online is a data center operator based out of Germany. It has been operational since 1997 and offers both colo and cloud hosting to its customers. The company’s other campuses in Nuremberg, and Falkenstein employ around 300 staff. Hetzner Finland Oy employs around 30 people, with more expected as further data centers are built.