BNP Paribas increases Grid Computing capacity thanks to atNorth

atNorth's long standing customer, BNP Paribas, continues to move portions of their workloads to the Nordic region. This will enable the leading financial institution to continue to support the increasing need for high performance, data-intensive IT workloads.

The migration of another portion of its IT workload to the atNorth site in Sweden is a continuation of BNP Paribas’ program to refresh and expand its High-Performance Computing (HPC) server farm – a vital hub for applications used to calculate the positions and associated risks in the financial markets – to atNorth’s Nordics datacenters. The original move to Iceland in 2018 resulted in an increase of nearly 30% in total capacity, reduced energy consumption by more than 50 percent, and decreased CO2 output by 85 percent. By moving additional workloads to the atNorth site in Sweden, BNP Paribas demonstrates continued commitment to sustainably future proof its IT infrastructure and reduce its carbon footprint across the whole of the global business.

“atNorth has been instrumental in helping BNP Paribas ensure our IT operations are as sustainable and carbon neutral as possible, which is an initiative close to the core of our business at the moment,” stated Alexis Carrion, CIB Global Head of Data Centers, BNP Paribas. “We have seen great results from migrating IT workloads to atNorth’s data center site in Iceland five years ago. As we look to increase our grid computing capacity, the atNorth site is the obvious solution in meeting both demand as well as our guiding principles for sustainability and efficiency. atNorth meets all our criteria and importantly are an operational partner that we know and trust to help us to advance our best practices to reduce the digital footprint of our IT infrastructure and operations.”

atNorth’s data center in Sweden, is built for heat recovery, and is considered one of the country’s most energy efficient data centers . The data center is designed to operate with the lowest carbon footprint possible. The site can capture the heat from up to 85 percent of the electricity used within the center, which is passed on to the central district heating system to provide heat and hot water for the surrounding community. This innovative use of large-scale heat reuse exemplifies a new generation of data center design and contributes to the circular economy.

“Our partnership with BNP Paribas is very well aligned with atNorth’s mission of providing environmentally responsible compute facilities at scale, BNP Paribas has with this new project yet again demonstrated their leadership in lowering their environmental impact and emphasis on responsible IT deployments. Through the years BNP Paribas has showcased that focus on sustainability amplifies best practices and has resulted in the best outcome for the environment and their business. BNP Paribas has been an early mover in its ambition to put sustainability and carbon neutrality at the forefront of its business and we are excited to help the team expand their operations to the atNorth site in Stockholm,” commented Gisli Kr., CSO atNorth. “Sweden’s climate and renewable energy resources, combined with atNorth’s innovative cooling and large-scale reuse of heat is now attracting European companies who want to reduce their CO2 footprint. BNP Paribas has proven to be an organization that is truly paving the way for business today, demonstrating the critical role that global leaders can play in creating a more sustainable future as we continue to fuel a digitally data-hungry world.”