Penta Infra has officially opened its first Belgian data center. After acquiring the site last year, the Dutch player is ready to welcome customers as well as house the servers of the VUB.
Penta Infra has officially declared its first Belgian data center open. Penta Infra BRU01 is the new name for the former Nexus site, built by Ghelamco. The Dutch data center specialist purchased that building in the summer of last year.
During the festive opening, the unique capabilities of BRU01 were highlighted. The eight-story building in the Zone 1 Research Park in Zellik is the first sustainably designed data center from the ground up in Belgium. The building is integrated into the Green Energy Park project and will be part of a kind of energy island where it becomes the central hub for both electricity and heat flows.
Sustainability was high on the agenda during construction. The most visible expression of this is that one of the facades is completely covered by solar panels. BRU01 has BREEAM Excellent and EDGE Advanced certificates to support these sustainability goals.
Inside, there is initially space for 7.2 MW of IT capacity. With an area of 3,500 m², there is enough room to scale up to about 13 MW in the future if demand exists. The data center has a Tier III ranking from the Uptime Institute.
Strategic Location
“BRU01 is right in the middle of the two axes of the FLAPD data center region,” says Bob Sprengers, CEO of Penta Infra. However, the traditional hotspots for data centers are approaching their maximum capacity, both in terms of public opinion and available power. This is different in Belgium.
“In our country, we have both the space and the energy to build more data centers,” says Carole Santens, Managing Director of the Belgian Digital Infrastructure Association. “Even with the limitations in the news.”
BRU1 is a vendor-agnostic data center with connections to the networks of all major providers. During the opening, Frédérid Libotte, senior relationship manager of BNIX, praises the data center for its excellent location, but we also see banners from Telenet Business on site. Arcadiz (now part of Eurofiber) is also an important partner. Penta Infra aims to position itself as a neutral colocation player, offering customers connections to all providers.
Ready for the Supercomputer
The data center will house the first supercomputer for the VUB by the end of the year. Other VUB infrastructure will also move to the site. Furthermore, BRU01 is completely open to customers of all kinds. The data center is prepared for both traditional workloads and installations with higher density. During the opening, the importance of AI is repeatedly mentioned, and not without reason.
With the official opening of BRU01, Penta Infra immediately has a very visible footprint in Belgium. The opening of the data center fits into a broader trend, where Belgian IT capacity is growing strongly. BDIA expects an expansion of about 50 percent in capacity this year, from 100 MW in 2025 to 146 by the end of this year. Colocation data centers like Penta Infra’s play an important role in this.