Company insight
Pictured above (left to right): Ricardo Jantarada from BNP Paribas, Þórdís Kolbrún Gylfadóttir, Iceland’s Minister of Tourism, and Gísli Kr from atNorth. BNP Paribas CIB has partnered with atNorth to assist their sustainability aims and provide AI and HPC operations as efficiently as possible.
data centres, for which HPC is a central pillar of its business. It provides artificial intelligence (AI) and HPC-as-a-service solutions that are dedicated to empowering customers to execute HPC and AI operations as efficiently as possible. HPCFLOW is its on-demand platform – and the basis of a fully flexible solution to meet the unique HPC needs of any business. “The Iceland project with atNorth is one of the first data centre projects that had a sustainability agenda,” says Jantarada. “When we realised that our HPC farm would keep on growing, we started looking for new locations, first to spread our risk across multiple locations, and also to improve its energy footprint by looking at several criteria, such as power efficiency, clean energy, attractive prices, and good enough network connectivity and latency to ensure our applications would work.” Iceland ticked all these boxes. Its cold climate reduces the need to consume energy for cooling a data centre and the energy that is used comes 100% from natural and renewable sources. “The climate in Iceland is very data centre friendly,” says Gisli Kr, chief commercial officer of atNorth. “The fluctuation in temperature is very little on an annual basis, averaging at 5.1°C, which makes cooling in Iceland very cost-efficient.”
“Here in Iceland, electric energy comes 75% from hydroelectric power and 25%
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from geothermal energy production, so any server connected in the country is powered by renewable energy,” he adds. “Our activity does not produce any greenhouse gas emissions.”
A win/win for people and technology
But Iceland has much more to offer beyond a cool climate and a highly skilled workforce. On a map it may seem quite remote, but it takes only two or three hours to fly from London. So, in practical terms, it’s very easy to commute to. “Also, Iceland is not very densely populated, with over two-thirds of the population living in close proximity to Reykjavik, where our data centre campuses are located,” remarks Kr. “My point is that access to very well-educated and capable people is quite good. In our conversations with organisations in the financial industry today, we notice in particular two things that take more space in their decision-making in terms of collocation of data centres and infrastructure as a service: scalability and environmental responsibility.” “With the increased emphasis on digital transformation in the financial industry, organisations like BNP Paribas are taking the responsible deployment of digital infrastructure very seriously,” Kr adds. “From these conversations we are clearly seeing that powering all infrastructure
with 100% renewable energy, such as geothermal or hydropower, is only a base requirement. Power efficiency has become a big factor and we see that responsible use of the power consumed by the digital infrastructure is fast becoming a requirement for all of the financial institutions we are in conversation with.” While Iceland as a location has many benefits for banks, their presence is also a boon for the development of the country’s economy. It is a win/win situation, as Þórdís Kolbrún, Iceland’s minister of tourism, industry and innovation, explains. “Iceland is a leader in green energy,” she says. “100% of our electricity is renewable and the cold climate is a competitive advantage, and our electricity prices are competitive. Then you can add in the new data connection directly from Iceland to Ireland.” “We have renewable resources that we can utilise, but we also have all kinds of experience and knowledge we can export,” Kolbrún continues. “Human capital is a resource we can build on and that is an opportunity for us as the world goes green.”
It seems that the road to the icy north, in short, could be the one to take for any bank that is serious about mitigating the impact of the environment from its digital transformation strategy. ●
https://atnorth.com 15
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