Russia has just adopted a data localization law that took effect in September. It required all personal data of Russian Internet users to be stored in data centers within Russia. For this purpose, the government is building its largest data center ever, which will be powered by a nuclear power plant.
The new data center will be built by the Rosenergoatom, a state power enterprise. It is also the entity that owns and operates the Kalinin Nuclear Power Plant, the facility that will power the data storage. The data center itself will be built on top of nuclear power plant, which will directly provide up to 80 MW to the center's more than 10,000 server racks, reported Telecom Daily.
The massive data center will be used by Rosenergoatom and the rest of the servers are available for lease to companies such as Facebook, Twitter and Google. Russia announced it will be conducting compliance to the data localization law and companies found violating the rule will be blocked without court orders, according to Bloomberg BNA.
Russian authorities estimate that there are at least 2.6 million entities covered by the data localization law. These companies — which include Google, Facebook, Uber, Twitter and PayPal — are already partly storing data in Russian domestic servers, reported the Washington Times.
