Situated in Heraklion, the new data center will be the island’s first carrier-neutral facility, and is expected to support the development of up to 6.5 megawatts (MW) of installed IT load, with the first phase scheduled for completion in 2025. Digital Realty expects the facility to serve as an interconnection hub for intercontinental and regional subsea cables landing on the entire island, including at Chania, Tympaki and Sitia.
Combined with Digital Realty’s growing presence in Athens (two operational data centers and two under development), this facility in Crete is expected to enable customers to build new network routes with lower latencies to Eastern Europe and Northern Africa. Furthermore, subsea cable and network operators are expected to be able to reduce development costs and increase the resiliency of their Mediterranean networks as they expand to meet the burgeoning demand for capacity.
The new data center in Crete is expected to also enable the significant expansion of PlatformDIGITAL®, Digital Realty’s global data center platform, which enables customers to rapidly deploy their critical infrastructure at the heart of a growing connected data community consisting of 1,500+ enterprises, 1,200+ network service providers, and 1,100+ cloud and IT providers globally.
The development complements Digital Realty’s presence in Marseille, which currently accounts for 90% of subsea cable traffic between Asia, the Middle East, East Africa and Europe.
Apostolos Kakkos, Chairman & CEO, Lamda Hellix: A Digital Realty Company, comments, “Our expansion into Crete has been designed in close collaboration with our subsea cable partners, and is expected to meet the demand for a carrier-neutral data center provider on the island. The Heraklion facility will serve as an interconnection point for intercontinental and regional subsea cables, redistributing content to Greece, Turkey, Northern Africa and Central Eastern Europe, as well as the Balkans. It’s an important part of Digital Realty’s integrated Mediterranean strategy, alongside our existing hubs in Marseille and Athens, and hubs under development in Barcelona and Israel.”
