OVHcloud reveals story behind its ‘recycled’ data centres

“Sustainability has been a key part of our company approach since its establishment in 1999,” said Gregory Lebourg, Global Environment Director, OVHcloud. “We often talk about our vertical integration, which enabled us to re-use 36% of our server components in 2023. But we can also build a datacentre in almost any kind of existing building – any some of our buildings had very interesting ‘first lives’ before we met them.”

OVHcloud’s datacentres around the world include the following sites:

· Beauharnois, Canada: This facility – which assembles all servers used in the North American region – was formerly a Rio Tinto aluminium plant. Sitting next to Hydro-Quebec’s power plant, this building is powered entirely by green energy – predominantly from the dam on the Saint Lawrence Seaway. The building has the team and capability to build almost 1,000 servers each week, including the bespoke water-cooling equipment used by OVHcloud.

· Croix, France: OVHcloud’s European factory currently hosts a highly skilled workforce building servers, as well as specialist machines that use lasers to automatically cut and fold the server trays prior to server assembly. Previously, the facility was an industrial plant belonging to Ontex, a leader in baby, female and adult care products. Prior to this, the facility was owned by Tyco (now Covidien) which produces security products specifically for the healthcare industry.

· Erith, UK: OVHcloud opened this facility in 2016, but it started life as a Mercury Communications switch centre built in the 1990s, before it was acquired by One2One / T-Mobile, which later merged with Orange and became EE. The datacentre also has a falcon nesting in the telecommunications tower on-site, which helps to keep the pigeon population at bay.

· Gravelines, France: This facility was formerly owned by Rexam to make aluminium cans and was opened by OVHcloud in 2013 after a four-year break. The building hosts a number of different cloud environments including a highly secure SecNumCloud area and is one of the largest facilities in the OVHcloud portfolio.

· Hillsboro, US: This building was opened in 2017, after spending most of its life as an electronic piano factory.

· Limburg, Germany: Not far from Frankfurt, this building was previously a printing factory, and was opened as OVHcloud’s 21st datacentre in 2016. It later saw an expansion to include a second facility.

· Vint Hill, USA: The Vint Hill site has a strong military background, and an NSA signals intelligence facility existed there in 1942. During World War II, the facility intercepted a message that provided intelligence critical to the D-Day invasion of Normandy. Today the area holds not only an OVHcloud datacentre, but also a scenic wedding venue.

“We’re always trying to keep our business operations sustainable, and this includes re-using old facilities wherever possible. We’re dedicated to bringing the best possible offerings to businesses around the world, including both owned datacentres and our smaller, more agile local zones. We’ll continue to balance innovation and sustainability, ensuring that the needs of today don’t compromise the world of tomorrow – and a key part of this is celebrating the colourful, fascinating histories of some of the buildings that we occupy,” concluded Emma Dennard, VP Northern Europe, OVHcloud.