Athens-3 data center inaugurated near Greek capital

Athens-3 data center inaugurated near Greek capital

Digital Governance Minister Kyriakos Pierrakakis inaugurated the new Athens-3 data center on Thursday, at the Athens Data Center Campus in Koropi.

In 2019 Greece was in the US Department of Commerce’s 301-Tariff Actions and Exclusion Process list, noted Pierrakakis, “a list you don’t want to be in.

”But together with Development amd Investments Minister Adonis Georgiadis, said Pierrakakis, and “with synchronized actions, we got off that list, but along the way we realized that we needed to bring investments into the cloud domain.

”Pierrakakis added that now Greece can claim to have one of the most innovative cloud strategies in the European Union, “what we refer to as Cloud First Policy.”

He explained that the public sector was transformed into a cloud-services client, “either on premise-cloud or public cloud.”

This digital transition was achieved in record-breaking time, he said. Athens-3 has 6.8 megawatts of IT capacity, the largest in Greece, occupies a facility of 8,600 square meters, and is powered exclusively by green energy sources.It was built by Lamda Hellix, a Digital Realty company.

Lamda Hellix was founded in 2002. Originally built as a cable landing station, its first facility, Athens-1, opened in 2003 and was the first data center to gain a LEED v4 Gold badge.

It opened Athens-2 in 2016, after weathering the Greek debt crisis. Its existing Athens campus comprises two carrier-neutral data centers totaling 22MW of capacity.

Earlier this year Telecom Italia/TIM subsidiary Sparkle opened 7.7MW facility in Athens, its fourth in the country. Located in Athens close to Metamorfosis I, the new Metamorfosis II facility comprises an area of about 6,000 sq m, with a maximum capacity of 700 racks in six modules,

Microsoft is also developing its first Greek Azure Cloud region.