Photos: The 10 most unique data centers in the world

Bahnhof Pionen White Mountain - Stockholm, Sweden

Modern data centers are being built in less than traditional locations for increased security, reduced power consumption for cooling, and to accommodate non-traditional hardware. This gallery features 10 data centers that stand out in this category.

The Swedish ISP Bahnhof has a reputation for architecturally interesting data centers -- the company refers to its facilities as data bunkers -- and its flagship Pionen facility is foremost among them. The Pionen facility is built in a Cold War era nuclear bunker, and features both a standard UPS system for continuous power, and two Maybach diesel submarine engines for backup power generation.

Image: Bahnhof AB

Bahnhof Lajka Space Station - Kista Science City, Sweden

Bahnhof’s first data center outside of Stockholm is in the Kista Science City innovation cluster, and is an all-steel structure designed to resemble a space station. The reason given on the Bahnhof website is "Who would build this if we didn't?" The outside of the Lajka Space Station and the interior of the Pionen White Mountain can be seen in this promotional video, which reenacts a legal battle between Bahnhof and the Swedish government about the collection of internet metadata.

Image: Bahnhof AB

OVH RBX-4 - Roubaix, France

The French hosting company OVH designed a square data center that uses no air conditioning -- instead of a solid building, the inner core is hollow, and is used for ventilation, while the servers are water-cooled.

Image: OVH

Yahoo Computing Coop - Lockport, NY

Yahoo's new data center design takes stylistic cues from the classic chicken coop in order to reduce the costs of cooling the data center. Although it is designed to use natural cooling 99% of the time, a direct evaporative cooling system is on premises for circumstances that require additional cooling. The facility is powered by hydroelectric power from nearby Niagara Falls, NY.

Image: Yahoo

Barcelona Supercomputing Center - Barcelona, Spain

The Barcelona Supercomputing Center is the home of MareNostrum, a supercomputer used for genome research, among other uses. Interestingly, the facility is actually a former chapel, called the Torre Girona at the Polytechnic University of Catalonia.

Image: Barcelona Supercomputing Center

CyberBunker - Goes, The Netherlands

CyberBunker is a data center built in a decommissioned NATO above-ground nuclear bunker in The Netherlands that is designed to operate for over 10 years without outside contact. As a result of a zoning dispute, officials from Goes attempted to enter the facility using hydraulic tools intended for rescuing victims of car crashes. This attempt only broke the doors, leaving them unable to be opened. According to CyberBunker, the total repair bill paid by the city was €24,500 ($35,840 USD, when adjusted for today's inflation). Some time later, a SWAT team also unsuccessfully attempted to enter the facility.

Image: CyberBunker

PCextreme - Middelburg, The Netherlands

PCextreme’s data centers are standard architecturally, and the most interesting thing about the servers is not where they are being stored, but the servers themselves.

In addition to traditional server systems, the company also offers colocation of Raspberry Pi systems for €3 per month (€36, or $40.53 USD, per year). The company has designed custom boards to fit multiple Raspberry Pi systems in racks, and is working on improving designs to be more space efficient. PCextreme notes that the Raspberry Pi uses 3-5 watts compared to 75-150 watts of midrange servers, making it a more energy-efficient solution for use cases where "full" computers are not needed.

Image: Thor de Regt / PCextreme

HavenCo - The Principality of Sealand

HavenCo is (or, alternately, was) a data center that was founded in 2000 on the decommissioned HM Fort Roughs -- otherwise known as the Principality of Sealand -- six miles off of the coast of England. The experiment ended in November 2008, and appeared to be forever abandoned in this post-mortem writeup in 2012. HavenCo reopened in late 2013 to operate a cold storage facility, though its website is presently offline.

Image courtesy of Ryan Lackey

Cloud&Heat - Germany

Cloud&Heat re-imagines what a data center is by taking a specially-designed cabinet and placing it in personal residences or commercial buildings. These specially designed cabinets allow the heat generated by the servers to be harvested to heat water and air on premises. The Cloud&Heat design allows for workloads to be concentrated to specific regions as weather conditions warrant. For example, if the outside temperature is colder in Bonn than it is in Stuttgart, higher workloads would be allocated to systems in Bonn to generate the needed heat. Although presently limited to Germany, perhaps in the future your home can be heated with a server cabinet.

Image: Cloud&Heat