Austrian data center supplier Electric Power Systems (EPS) has launched new wooden data center modules.

The company this month announced the launch of Dendora, a modular prefabricated data center with a wooden frame.

“Our vision was to develop a data center based on renewable materials, reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and thus make a tangible contribution to a more climate-friendly IT infrastructure,” said Josef Frühwirth, managing director of EPS.

The pods, which can offer 10-40kW of capacity, are equipped with a free cooling system and use refrigerants such as propane. An on-site solar system is available, and the company said the module can offer its waste heat to nearby buildings.

The name Dendora comes from the words dendrology, the study of trees. The company says the modules will use only Austrian wood via local timber firm Binderholz.

Founded in 1998, EPS offers data center solutions including power, cooling, racks and cabling, networking, and UPS systems. It also offers a more traditional containerized data center pod made of metal, ranging from 20ft and 12kW up to 40ft and 58kW.

EPS has previously provided data center solutions to sports media company LAOLA1 in Vienna, Voestalpine Group in Kindberg, Würth Austria in Böheimkirchen, Silicon Austria Labs in Villach, and others.

Wood has been cited as a potential structural material for data centers for some time. EcoDataCenter and Boden Type use CLT for their data centers in Sweden, as do some Icelandic data centers. Microsoft recently announced that it is constructing two data centers in Northern Virginia, partially using cross-laminated timber.

Vertiv also offers its own prefabricated wooden data center module. The TimberMod variant of its SmartMod container series uses mass timber instead of steel for structural elements, including the casing. German firm Prior1 has also launched a timber data center module.

Some critics have suggested that wood is unsuitable because it is flammable, citing the role of wooden floors and ceilings in the disastrous fire that destroyed OVHcloud’s SBG2 data center in 2001. However, proponents point out that glulam structural components survive fires better than many other materials.