Photo credit: Apple.

By Anders Lorenzen 

The computer and technology giant Apple has announced they are to build a new data centre in Denmark.

It will be built in the south of Denmark near the German border, by the city of Aabenraa and will be ready by 2019 and will run on 100% renewable energy.

It is Apple’s second Danish data centre. Last year the construction started on their Viborg data centre which will also run on 100% renewables and will be partially in operation later this year. And it seems that Denmark is a hot market for the world’s top tech giants – with Facebook announcing in January that it will build a similar data centre in Odense, again running entirely on renewables.

Apple will spend 6 billion Danish crowns ($921 million US dollars) building the Aabenraa data centre, and it will power their online services, including the iTunes Store, App Store, iMessage, Maps and Siri for their customers across Europe.

Erik Stannow, the Nordic manager for Apple, said that one of the main reasons for choosing to build the data centre in Denmark was due to the reliability of their grid, while noting: “We’re thrilled to be expanding our data center operations in Denmark, and investing in new sources of clean power”.

The Danish Council on Climate Change (Klimaraadet), an independent organisation advising the Danish government on climate change says that the data centres could increase Denmark’s electricity consumption by 10%, and therefore there will need to be an increase in renewable energy deployments to stay within their climate targets. They encourage the government to propose an ambitious climate strategy this autumn.

As more and more people in the world get access to the internet, combined with the world economy rapidly moving towards a digital and online economy, the demand for new data centres will only increase. It is how they’re powered that will showcase how seriously the world’s tech giants are taking the climate challenge. So far Apple and Facebook are leading the way. Will others follow?