The interesting and highly-established company, Bulk Infrastructure has joined NBCC as a partner member! We’ve had a chat with Rob Elder, their VP of Data Centers and a council member of NBCC about the company.
Who are Bulk Infrastructure for those who don’t know?
Bulk Infrastructure is a leading provider of sustainable digital infrastructure in the Nordics. We are an industrial investor, developer and operator of industrial real estate, data centres and fibre networks.
Our headquarters are in Oslo, and we believe in the value creation opportunity of enabling our digital society to be fully sustainable.
Our ambition is to be the go-to player for any company that wants to leverage the Nordics for data processing requirements, whether in Denmark, Sweden or Norway.
We do this by combining our expertise in developing large scale real estate for industrial and data centre use, with 100% renewable power, large areas of zoned land to ensure sustainable data processing and storage and by connecting our data centre locations to international markets through high capacity subsea and terrestrial fibre Networks.
To maintain high levels of availability and security, we operate all parts of our infrastructure to make sure our customers are supported throughout the lifecycle of their deployments.
By combining these three key areas, we can support international companies looking to expand in a low cost and sustainable way wherever they are located.
You are operating within a field of constant change and innovations. What exciting/innovative/new project are you working on or about to start with?
We had a strong and exciting start to 2022 with continued investment in new and ongoing projects to support our long-term strategic goals.
We went live with two new subsea systems on the Fibre side in March.
The first is Bulk’s owned and operated subsea system Havsil between Norway and continental Europe, which offers the shortest high-capacity route from Norway in a sustainable way.
The second was the Havhingsten cable system between Denmark and the UK, representing true diversity, avoiding congested parts of the English Channel and delivering the lowest latency between Dublin and the Nordic region. This connects up to Esbjerg in Denmark, where we also have the new Havsil cable to Norway. Our third system that went live in 2021 – Havfrue, connects the US/Nordic.
On the data centre side, we are well underway with our expansion project in Kristiansand, Southern Norway, which sees us preparing a further 150,000m2 for data centre construction and increasing the installed power capacity at the site to 125MVA.
What are your links to UK/ Norway (depending on where your headquarter is)?
Bulk Infrastructure is headquartered in Oslo; however, our international sales and marketing teams are based in London.
Norway already has strong connections to the UK both physically with new subsea and power cables and trade and investment.
With our focus on providing sustainable digital infrastructure out of the Nordics, we see a strong alignment with the UK and in working together to help solve large challenges on growth and sustainability.
Why did you choose to become a member of NBCC?
Norway and Britain have a long-standing history of collaboration and trade. By being a member of NBCC, we seek to establish new relationships within the NBCC member community and Norwegian organisations and start a dialogue on how to increase collaboration between Norway and Britain on digital services.
Where do you think trade between Norway and UK will be in 10 years?
We would like to see an increase in trade and collaboration on developing digital services to power more of the computing from renewable energy. The UK has a vast amount of expertise and knowledge, as does Norway. But what Norway can offer in terms of scale and sustainable power, the UK cannot.
For example, today, the power consumed by a server in the UK is approximately 10 x more carbon-intensive then in Norway – 230g vs 23g, and in Norway, it is 100% low carbon (gCO₂eq/kWh)
As we aim to make a better future for everyone, do you have views on the importance of technology, insight, ingenuity, and talent?
We believe change is happening now, and to solve the climate challenges, we need to find long term sustainable solutions. Solutions that will only come through continued investment in technology, openness and collaboration and from new talent and ideas driving us forward.
Thank you very much for your time, and we are looking forward to working with you going forward!
