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Rostelecom is in talks with Norilsk Nickel to build an underground data center in Russia, the business daily Vedomosti reported. The partly state-owned telecoms operator is developing buried data centers with an increased level of protection agains
Featured: Exterior view of a Rostelecom facility, the telecommunications operator planning the underground data center network.t external threats, the newspaper said, citing a company executive.
Rostelecom would build and operate the site and market it to government and corporate clients as secure infrastructure for data backup. Norilsk Nickel, the nickel and palladium miner, would contribute expertise in underground construction and mine safety. Terms of the discussions were not disclosed.
The talks follow a series of drone strikes on Russian data centers. Ukrainian drones hit three Yandex data centers, a Sberbank facility under construction, and a data center belonging to social media company VK between Oct. 8 and Oct. 18, the Kyiv Independent reported.
Russia's Digital Development Ministry approved recommendations in late October for protecting data centers from aerial threats, including placing strategic facilities underground or in bunkers, Meduza reported, citing the newspaper Kommersant.
Placing facilities underground is the third and final level of protection, a Rostelecom source told Vedomosti. The first level is a backup site holding copies of data in case the main infrastructure is damaged. The second distributes computing capacity and services across geographically dispersed sites, DCD reported.
*"A so-called 'doomsday' data center is a must-have, because backup is what allows any service provider to recover quickly,"* said Valeriy Ermakov, vice president at Rostelecom, at the RBC Tech forum.
Petr Pavelko, deputy director at the management company Rental PRO, put the average cost of a modern surface data center in Russia at 1.2 to 1.3 billion rubles per megawatt of IT load, CNews reported, citing iKS-Consulting. Independent expert Artem Semenikhin told CNews that Rostelecom needs significant electrical capacity, while Norilsk Nickel has its own power plants, gas fields, and spare capacity.
Russian officials have also looked at disused mines. Kemerovo Oblast governor Ilya Seredyuk proposed in October housing data centers inside depleted open-pit mines and quarries. Serhiy Petrenko, former head of Yandex Ukraine, has estimated that about 80 percent of Russia's data centers sit in Moscow and the surrounding region, within reach of Ukrainian long-range drones.
Baxtel tracks 58 data center facilities in Russia, operated by 18 providers and led by Rostelecom with 16 facilities. The largest is IXcellerate's Moscow South Campus (MOS5) at 64 MW.
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