Data center operators in Norway have been given until July 1 to comply with new transparency regulations.

The new Norweigan Electronic Communications Act came into force on January 1. As reported by DCD, the legislation aims to create a register of data centers in Norway and discourage cryptominers from setting up in the Nordic nation.

Norway claims to be the first European country to set up a national register of data centers.

Nkom, Norway’s telecoms regulator, which has been tasked with enforcing the rules, has announced existing data centers will be granted a transition period to register their details. This will run until July 1, 2025. New data centers need to register before building work starts.

Businesses that don’t comply with the legislation could be fined up to 5 percent of their annual turnover.

Karianne Tung, minister of digitalization and public administration, said: “Almost everything we do on a PC or smartphone during the course of a day goes through a data center. It is therefore absolutely necessary to set requirements [so] that security is maintained, and to put in place specific regulations for this industry.”

The regulations require data center operators to register their company name, address and legal status, as well as a named representative who can act as a point of contact for authorities. They must also provide information about the services offered in the data center and whether there are public agencies and businesses on its customer list.

The operator must also provide an estimate of how much of the power is used for cryptocurrency mining, as well as the total energy consumption of the data center.

Norway’s cool climate and plentiful supply of clean electricity – its grid runs entirely on renewable energy – has been an attractive proposition for data center operators. And while the Norweigan government is keen to embrace digital infrastructure providers, it does not want to become a haven for cryptomining.

Speaking last year, the country’s energy minister Terje Aasland told local news outlet VG that cryptomining “is associated with large greenhouse gas emissions, and is an example of a type of business we do not want in Norway.”

Data center companies operating in Norway include Green Mountain, which handed over a 30MW facility in Oslo to social media giant TikTok in December 2023.

In February 2024, Google announced it was spending €600 million ($646.4m) on a site with a power capacity of up to 240MW. It will be built on 200 hectares of land in the Gromstul area of Skien, around 85 miles southwest of Oslo, which it acquired in 2019. The first phase is due to go live in 2026.

Microsoft launched two Azure cloud regions in Norway back in 2019, though one has since been delisted and is a reserved access region. AWS has an Edge location in Oslo.