Main reasons for building one are basically the same as for laying an underwater cable: it is less likely to be damaged by humans and – on the other side – it will not stay in their way (hopefully). Consequently, such a facility would be the best choice for a customer whose top priority is data safety (which surely includes physical aspect as well). Is it a trend today? Maybe not really yet. But there is actually a trend of re-usage of old industrial facilities – such as exhausted mines. And it has been an important problem in industrial areas all over the world for decades already.

A Norwegian underground datacenter under construction (opening planned next summer) is not the first one of its kind, but it is likely to become well-known in the future as IBM has already booked a place there. Norway is a good place for such projects for several reasons. Firstly, there are plenty of mines in the country; and many of them have quite a long history: particularly, some silver mines in Norway were built in the first half of the 17th century. Secondly, it is easier to find some ‘wilderness’ there to create such ‘out-of-way’ facilities which would be at the same time geographically close to metropolitan areas and major transport hubs of Northern and Northwestern Europe.

Speaking about reusage of mines and other similar objects (underground military facilities, bomb shelters or hidden storages of some kind), such an object could be a nice finding for a data services company because it would already possess some infrastructure: rooms, ventilation holes, proper system of passages, possibly even some functioning wires. Of course such a place would need some serious clean-up, especially one that was left many years ago. But digging a new underground space is likely to be more costly. Besides, there is another sweet option for a data center company: governments are often willing to do something with obsolete facilities like exhausted mines or abandonded military bases. Therefore some negotiations around such an object could help its new owner to obtain some state investments or other bonuses.

Summing it up, it seems that a proper location to build an underground datacenter in must be:

not heavily populated;

but at the same time easily accessible; and

having some decent amount of unused underground facilities to choose from.

Other than in Norway, many such locations can easily be found in Eastern Europe. Most of countries from this region still own significant infrastructure pieces left after the dissolution of giant industrial and military systems of the Soviet era.

Generally, going underground gives you +1 level of safety in case you are worried about how things are going on the surface. Sadly, it looks like the number of territories where things start getting worse is growing lately. So in case when building underground data centers becomes a really powerful trend, we’ll know that life has become less safe, universally. Professional ‘IT-diggers’ would massively emerge then: they would create such facilities from scratch and not just utilize existing infrastructure.