Summary
- NovoServe will install 80 racks and 400kW at NorthC Oude Meer.
- A further 70 racks and 300kW will follow at maincubes Schiphol-Rijk.
- The phased deployment uses capacity inside two operating colocation facilities.
Dutch infrastructure provider NovoServe is adding 150 racks and 700kW across two operating colocation facilities near Amsterdam, expanding its bare-metal platform without waiting for a new data centre to be built.
The first installation covers 80 racks and 400kW at NorthC’s Oude Meer facility. NovoServe will then add another 70 racks and 300kW at maincubes’ Schiphol-Rijk site in two phases over the following months.
Although the additional capacity is small beside Europe’s multi-hundred-megawatt campus pipeline, it can enter service through existing buildings, network routes, security systems, and power infrastructure on a considerably shorter programme.
Working around live infrastructure
Installing equipment inside an operating data centre removes planning and shell-construction risk, yet it places the delivery team inside an environment where existing customers, maintenance controls, cable routes, cooling systems, and security procedures cannot be disrupted.
If the announced capacity were divided evenly, the allocation would average approximately 5kW per rack at Oude Meer and 4.3kW at Schiphol-Rijk. Actual deployments may vary considerably, with heavier compute racks balanced by lower-density network, storage, or customer equipment.
NovoServe has not disclosed rack-level limits or the cooling systems available to the new installations. Bare-metal platforms can include a broad mix of server configurations, and the practical capacity of each row will depend on airflow, containment, local electrical distribution, and the density permitted by the host facility.
Power must be allocated through the live site without weakening its resilience design. New rack PDUs, branch circuits, busway connections, cooling controls, monitoring points, and customer metering may all be required, followed by testing that confirms the additional load does not create local hot spots or overload a shared component during a fault.
The physical installation forms only one part of the deployment. Servers must be received, checked, racked, cabled, configured, and integrated with NovoServe’s network and customer-management systems before the capacity can generate revenue.
Two host operators, one customer platform
Operating across NorthC and maincubes gives NovoServe more room to stage deployments and distribute customers, but it also creates operational boundaries between the customer-facing provider and the companies responsible for the buildings.
Contracts and procedures must establish responsibility for maintenance, incident response, access control, power quality, planned work, environmental limits, and capacity forecasting. A problem in the facility layer may appear to the customer as a NovoServe service failure even where the underlying cause sits with the host operator.
The Amsterdam region retains dense fibre infrastructure and access to major exchanges, although route diversity has to be established physically rather than assumed from geography. Cross-connect lead times, building entry points, carrier availability, shared ducts, and upstream paths all influence the resilience and latency of the completed service.
Incremental expansion has particular value in the Dutch market, where grid congestion and planning scrutiny can make new capacity difficult to deliver. Host facilities with secured power can release smaller blocks faster than a developer can permit, connect, build, and commission a new site.
That advantage depends on spare capacity genuinely being available. Existing buildings may have unoccupied floor space while lacking enough power or cooling to fill it, and allocations can be constrained by commitments to other customers or by the need to preserve redundancy margins.
NovoServe’s programme illustrates how much of the market grows through modest additions inside operating halls rather than new campuses. The first racks should reach service quickly, while utilisation, further allocations, and the performance of the two-site operating model will determine whether another expansion follows.
