About 400 trees to be cut down to build data centre in Innopolis

Works to be more expensive than the plot’s price

The territory for a new data centre will start to be prepared in Innopolis. Atomdata-Innopolis, which is a part of Rosatom, ordered a corresponding complex of works for 26,5 million rubles. A parcel of 39,700 square metres is allocated for the construction. Interestingly, according to the Russian Registry’s data, it is some 100,000 rubles cheaper than its preparation for construction, which is 26,4 million rubles.

The first clause on the list of works is removing the vegetation on the construction site — deforestation and removing 381 stumps as well as cutting down bushes on an area of 8,000 square metres. All the wood is going to be taken to a landfill or disposed of.

Then the vegetation layer is going to be removed on an area of 9,500 square metres to remediate the parcel. Later, land works will be done at the site of the data centre. Authors of technical documentation think the excess of the soil will be about 66,900 tonnes.

The contractor who hasn’t yet been found must be a small or medium-sized business. It will be chosen after 30 March and it will have less than three months to do the works — they are due to end until 19 June.

Data centre built in 2023

This data centre will be second — Tatarstan’s biggest data centre built in 2009 is already located in Innopolis. As Tatarstan Minister of Digital Development Ayrat Khayrullin said, it is used a hundred per cent. The construction of the new one was brought up publicly for the first time as early as 2019 — a correspondent memorandum was signed during Digital Industry of Industrial Russia conference in Innopolis. The project that kicked off in September 2020 is implemented by Concern Rosenergoatom, which is a part of Rosatom state corporation. Atomdata-Innopolis, a subsidiary of Rosenergoatom, became the performer.

The data centre is planned to accommodate 500-1,000 frames for IT equipment with the possibility of further expansion to 2,000 frames with a total capacity of 16 MW. This will allow it to become the biggest data centre in the Volga Federal District.

The investments in the construction and creation of the engineering infrastructure of the data centre will be about 3 billion rubles. Several billions will be invested in servers, a virtual environment and Rosatom’s commercial cloud.

The construction was going to begin first in the second quarter of 2021 and open in January 2022. Ayrat Khayrulllin claimed the construction hadn’t yet started, therefore the deadline is put off.

“We hope our partners will start the construction of the first stage of the data centre next year. Now the design is under way. It is going to be a big new building with big capacities, it will be the biggest in the Volga area... I think in a year [Rosatom will have the time to build it]. They mapped everything out,” Khayrullin said.