Green Mountain: When Data Center Growth Drives IT Investment
Green Mountain designs, builds, and operates high-security, energyefficient data centers for global enterprises. The company has facilities in Stavanger, Rjukan, Enebakk, and Hamar in Norway, and is building a new one at Undheim in Rogaland. All data centers run on 100% renewable energy, with high energy efficiency as a core design principle.
Behind this infrastructure sits an increasingly business- critical IT organization. Its role is to ensure stable operations, manage growing complexity, and support continued expansion.
“There are no areas where our IT costs are declining. Everything grows with the business. When we build new data centers, we add more systems, more hardware, and more networking. Over time, this drives the IT budget upward and makes it difficult to realize traditional efficiency gains in the short term,” says Ole Kristian Risa, IT Director at Green Mountain.
As a result, a significant share of IT investments is directed toward upgrades and consolidation, rather than traditional cost optimization.
“We are essential to making our data centers function. If our systems stop, operations stop. At the same time, much of the infrastructure was built around each individual data center, and that adds complexity when we grow as fast as we do,” Risa explains.
Many of our solutions were originally designed for data centers in the 5–10 megawatt range. Today, we are building facilities of 50–100 megawatts. This means we invest heavily in reducing technical debt, modernizing platforms, and improving integration across systems. The objective is to build an IT landscape that can handle the scale we know is coming.
Ole Kristian Risa, IT Director, Green Mountain.
For the IT organization, this creates a persistent tension between ensuring stable operations, further developing existing systems, and supporting new projects.
“We are constantly stretched. We need to ensure stable operations and high uptime while also evolving existing systems and supporting new data centers under construction. All of these areas are urgent at the same time, which makes it challenging to prioritize and plan capacity. New projects can move quickly, and we need to be ready to respond.”
Looking ahead, Risa highlights a growing need for expertise in security, networking, and compliance, and over time, data and AI, particularly at the intersection of IT and operational technology. For a company experiencing rapid growth, making the right IT investments is critical.
“It comes down to building a foundation that allows us to keep growing without letting complexity run ahead of us. That is where we are focusing our efforts now,” Risa concludes.