In the Finnish municipality of Mäntsälä, the power supply of the data center owned by Yandex was turned off. The energy supplier has previously expressed readiness to stop working with the Russian technology giant if it falls under sanctions. Now the contract is being renewed, and diesel generators are used to power the facility.

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According to RBC , citing a source close to Yandex, the outage occurred on Monday, April 25. He kept silent about the reasons, but clarified that now the facility continues to operate, powered by diesel generators, and the company renews the contract with the energy operator. The data center in Finnish Mäntsälä is used by Yandex when working with foreign companies.

According to the official video, the data center was built in 2014, it is powered by two independent 110 kV sources and a set of diesel generators. The heat from the servers is used to power 1,000 houses in the city, and as more building blocks are added, the number should increase.

From open sources it is known that the Finnish energy operator “Yandex” Nivos Energia Oy. In March, the company spoke of its readiness to break off relations with a Russian client if he falls under sanctions. And in mid-April, I bought an enterprise in Mäntsälä that can replace the heat coming from the data center in the city.

In June last year, Yandex entered into a 5-year agreement with the energy company Ilmatar Energy, which has a network of wind farms – in early 2022, the facility was supposed to switch to renewable sources.

Aleksey Soldatov, head of the Russian data center operator DataPro, said that when working on diesel generators, it takes 300 liters of fuel per hour to generate 1 MW. Based on the design capacity of the Yandex data center of 40 MW and the current Finnish prices for diesel fuel, RBC calculated that at full load, a day of operation of the facility would cost €626,400 (46.7 million rubles). If we take not Finnish €2,175, but Russian 53 rubles. per liter of fuel, it will turn out cheaper – 15.3 million rubles. But Mr. Soldatov says that, given the circumstances, Yandex can reduce the load on the facility to a minimum, even less than 1 MW.