SDU creates advanced and energy-efficient data center for Danish AI and supercomputing research in collaboration with Danfoss and HPE

Digital sovereignty and sustainability

The data center is being built on Danish soil and will use Danish-developed open-source cloud technology, UCloud, which strengthens Denmark's digital sovereignty and enables researchers to efficiently utilize HPC resources without dependence on foreign technology providers. At the same time, Danfoss' cooling and heat recovery systems enable surplus heat from the new data center to be reused. The initiative is also supported by ProjectZero, a public-private partnership in Sønderborg with the goal of making its energy system carbon-neutral by 2029.

"At Danfoss, we are proud to support SDU with our unique cooling and heat recovery systems, minimizing the project's environmental footprint and showcasing the viability of green data center technologies. This collaboration allows us to demonstrate the power of cross-industry collaboration in driving sustainable solutions and proves that sustainability, technological advancement, and commercial attractiveness can go hand in hand," says Sune T. Baastrup, Chief Information Officer at Danfoss.

The data center is delivered by Danfoss and HPE Services and will be based on an HPE Data Center Services - AI Mod POD, a modular, performance-optimized data center for AI and HPC workloads. The modular data center includes high-performance and density-optimized HPE Cray XD225v and HPE ProLiant Compute XD685 servers, HPE ProLiant DL325 and DL365 servers, HPE Networking CX6300 switches, NVIDIA Quantum-2 InfiniBand networking platform, a total of 128 NVIDIA Blackwell GPUs and direct liquid cooling. The environment takes advantage of heat reuse modules provided by Danfoss for data center heat recovery.

HPE is a world leader in HPC and AI infrastructure and we are proud to work with the University of Southern Denmark to modernize their sovereign AI data center capabilities to advance research," said Carsten Nielsen, Vice President and Managing Director, Nordic Cluster at HPE. "We look forward to the scientific discoveries Danish researchers will make as a result of this collaborative effort."

Long-term perspective - a strong partnership

SDU and Danfoss already have a close collaboration, and the new data center provides further opportunities for joint research and development in AI, HPC, and more sustainable technology, while HPE delivers advanced modular data center containers and infrastructure that make the project possible.

Facts about the data center:

• Provides access to the latest NVIDIA HPC and AI infrastructure based on NVIDIA Blackwell for scientific research.
• HPC resources are made available via the national research cloud UCloud, whose user-friendly interface ensures accessibility for researchers from all disciplines. UCloud has been developed by the SDU eScience Center in collaboration with CLAAUDIA at Aalborg University and Center for Humanities Computing at Aarhus University over the past eight years and is used at all Danish universities, by several other public institutions, and private companies. The platform has 20,000 users.
• Fully integrated with Danfoss' advanced cooling and heat recovery systems, enabling significant energy savings and supporting CO₂-neutral operation.
• Surplus heat from the data center can be fully reused, providing a valuable local energy resource.
• The initiative is supported by ProjectZero, a public-private partnership in Sønderborg with the goal of making its energy system carbon-neutral by 2029. The project focuses on a three-step decarbonization approach of reducing, reusing, and renewing energy, and has already achieved a significant reduction in energy-related carbon emissions.