Sardinian Mine
Joining the cavern club Digital Metalla hopes to ape Norway’s Lefdal Mine and create a secure underground facility in a disused Sardinian mine
Dan Swinhoe News Editor
W
hat have the Romans ever done for us? Well, apart from the sanitation, the medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, the fresh-water system, and public health, they also made southwest Sardinia a mining region that today looks set to become the home for a new underground data center in the Mediterranean. Like Lefdal mine in Norway, Dauvea hopes to establish a new Tier III/IV data center in a disused mine; one that runs on renewable energy and uses the mine’s naturally cool air and water in lieu of traditional cooling equipment. DCD speaks to Dauvea’s executives about the Digital Metalla project. Digital Metalla; a data center in a Sardinian mine Antonio Pittalis and Salvatore Pulvirenti, founders and managing directors at Italian ICT firm Dauvea, have careers going back almost 30 years through Tiscali and Telecom Italia, CRS4 (Center for Advanced Studies, Research and Development in Sardinia), and Engineering D-HUB. Founded in 2017, Cagliari-based Dauvea provides a number of IT, cybersecurity. and cloud services. With the new Digital Metalla project, the pair aim to convert a disused government-owned silver mine into a data center. The mine, located near a town called Iglesias to the southwest of the main island in an area broadly known as Sulcis, was closed around 2000, but the area has been a mining hub since Roman times. Metalla is an archaeological site in the ancient Phoenician city of Sulci (or Sulcis), to the north of Sant'Antioco; the small island southwest of Sardinia's main island. The area has been mined for lead, silver, zinc, coal, and other minerals for thousands of years, and mines in the area only began to close in the 1990s. The area has previously been submitted for consideration as a UNESCO World Heritage site. “Metalla is a Latin word for mining,” explains Pulvirenti. “We tried to combine the old and the new.”
As well as having two independent fiber loops in the area, the company will use two naturally-cooled 200m deep lakes within the mine for equipment cooling using a heat exchanger. “The site contains several hundred million square cubic meters of water, a huge amount of water,” says Pulvirenti. “The air and water inside the site is 15 degrees Celsius – which is very low compared with the average temperature in Sardinia which is around 35 degrees Celcius in summer – and it is at the same temperature all year round.” Across two data rooms the company
aims to install data hall modules in phases up to around 2MW, though there could be potential to reach 4MW. The company would power the facility via an on-site solar farm and is exploring the possibility of including a hydrogen generation plant. Dauvea began exploring the possibility of a data center in the area around 2017/18, and in 2019 the local government began the process of offering the mine site out for tender for potential commercial uses. The tender process finished in 2020, with Dauvea granted rights to the facility for 25 years, and the pair spent another year gathering the necessary permits and authorizations to allow the project to go ahead. Dauvea is what Pulvirenti describes as ‘infrastructure-light’ in terms of its own data center footprint – it offers services from colocation and cloud facilities – but the two have been involved in a number of data center projects in previous roles. Pulvirenti acknowledges that hyperscalers
Issue 43 • December 2021 / January 2022 45
