Volkswagen Group opens carbon neutral data center in Norway

The Volkswagen Group moved into a new, climate neutral data center in Rjukan (Norway).

The facility was set up in six months in collaboration with the Norwegian partner Green Mountain. The data center will be 100 percent powered by hydropower in the future, thus saving more than 5,800 tons of CO2 per year compared to a conventionally operated data center.

The maximum output of 2,750 kilowatts will be used by the Volkswagen Passenger Cars and Audi brands for high-performance servers, on which computer-intensive vehicle development projects are processed.

The Volkswagen Group focuses on economic and ecological factors in the development of additional computing capacity. Volkswagen already operates a climate neutral data center in Iceland.

In future, the computing power of the new location will be used by the Volkswagen Passenger Cars and Audi brands for their vehicle development projects. These include simulations of crash tests and virtual wind tunnel tests. Such calculations are not time critical, but very complex and energy intensive. Outsourcing them to external data centers hugely relieves the IT infrastructure at domestic locations.