Green invests half a billion francs in the digital location Switzerland

Green is building its second data center campus, which will house three high-performance data centers and a business park

Zurich, Switzerland – With its IT infrastructure, Green helps to ensure that the economy is based on strong foundations and it serves as an important partner for international cloud providers. The company is now expanding its presence with a prominent statement: the Zurich Metro Campus – comprising three high-density data centers, a business park and integrated green zones. The campus is to be built in Dielsdorf and will cover more than 46,000 m², making it approximately four times as big as Times Square in New York. Green is investing 500 million Swiss francs in this major project. Construction will get underway in the first quarter of 2021 and the first data center is scheduled to be completed in the first quarter of 2022.

Major project with international reach
The Metro Campus will be an important component of Green’s vision of playing a part in evolving Switzerland into an innovative location for secure and sustainable data centers. With this aim in mind, Green has further developed the design of the data centers to ensure higher performance and more efficient power supply and cooling. Air flow simulations, cooling systems for the data rooms and waste heat recovery for the buildings mean that energy consumption can be kept to a minimum, irrespective of whether the center is used at partial or full capacity. The data centers thus achieve an excellent PUE value, even at an extremely high power density of more than 25 kilowatts per rack. The increased performance is ideal for high density applications such as those used by international cloud providers.

And the municipality of Dielsdorf will also profit from the innovations. The Metro Campus concept incorporates connection to a district heating/cooling system that can be used by every building in the municipality.

Campus will stimulate commerce and promote vocational training
In addition to the data centers, the site will also comprise three office buildings, commercial areas and green zones, as well as direct access to public transport. The campus can be easily reached from Zurich in 15 to 20 minutes. Usable commercial and office space of a total of 11,000 m² will be available to house various companies and Green’s specialist staff who will be needed to run the data centers. The first anchor customers for the data centers are already on board.

With its Metro Campus, Green is also continuing to invest in the future of various skilled professions and Green is further widening the range of apprenticeships it offers.

Geo-redundancy made in Switzerland
With the new data center campus, Green is bolstering the geo-redundancy of its current data centers and is making Switzerland even more attractive as a data location for both local and international companies. As early as 2019, Green extended the Zurich West campus with an 8-megawatt cloud data center, and three further new buildings, each with 11 megawatts, are already in the planning stage at this site.

Its latest major project therefore means that the company headquartered in Aargau will become the first Swiss operator to run two fully-developed locations for cloud providers in Switzerland: the Zurich West campus in Lupfig and soon the Metro Campus Zurich in Dielsdorf.