North Holland: The fastest growing data center hub in Europe

North Holland, with the Metropolitan Region of Amsterdam and the Schiphol Airport is one of the fastest growing data center regions in Europe. Access to the Amsterdam Internet Exchange is especially attractive to data center facilities that specialize on fast connectivity and export, such as media companies. Further, the strong digital economy of Amsterdam, further attracts data center facilities that hope to serve the digital resource demand of the regions.

The Schiphol Amsterdam Development Company is a legal entity owned by two municipalities, Amsterdam, Haarlemermeer and the Schiphol Group. It manages the development of land within the region, with the aim to stimulate economic activity, e.g. by developing business parks. As part of it’s strategy, it has zoned two two data center hubs, one next to Schiphol and one near the city of Haarlem (PolanenPark).

Managing growth: Ensuring that data center development short- and long-term meets sustainability goals

To ensure the development of data centers contributes to the sustainability goals of the region as well as creates local economic impact, SADC has worked with the SDIA to create a sustainability roadmap. Data centers that wish to buy land and settle in the area need to create a plan which meets both the construction & design objectives from this roadmap as well as show that the environmental performance will improve over time.

Part of this roadmap is a requirement that environmental and social impact information from the data center operator are made public, so that the data center operator can be held accountable for delivering on the objectives of the plan, even after the land is sold. As an indepedent nonprofit organization, the SDIA monitors the impact and informs policymakers and the public if the long-term roadmap and commitments are not met. This ensures that even after the land is sold, the operator has to uphold their commitments to continue to invest and improve the environmental and social performance of the facility.

The roadmap is public and adaptable

The roadmap adapts to two types of data centers: It applies to co-location facilities, in which the ICT equipment are brought by tenants themselves as well as data centers in which the operator also owns the ICT equipment (e.g. in the case of Cloud, Hosting or Business data centers). The roadmap is public and can be downloaded below.

The criteria of the roadmap are based on several years of research and is underpinned by the SDIA Roadmap, which has been adapted by the World Bank and other organizations.

Would you like to make you own?

For regions who want to adopt their own roadmap and criteria set, we have created a tool through which regions can configure their priorities and create a bespoke roadmap for themselves. You can access this policy tool here.

Reach out to us to learn more and explore how this can be applied to your region.