At the end of May, Paul Long, Crestchic’s Regional Manager for Rental Sales in the Nordics region, was invited to attend the launch of the Swedish Data Centre Industry’s new Impact Study, produced by Radar Group.
Here, Paul shares some of his key takeaways from the published report:
Data centres are critical to the Swedish economy
The report sets out the clearest economic case yet for treating data centres as critical national infrastructure. The headline numbers are striking: SEK 3,750 billion of Swedish business revenue is directly dependent on data centre capacity; the sector contributes SEK 57.8 billion to GDP; and installed capacity has roughly doubled since 2020 to around 800 MW, with hyperscale builds driving it well beyond that by 2030.
Resilience is non-negotiable
The study rightly emphasises the need for secure environments with redundancy, backup, monitoring, and notes that critical infrastructure must operate with very high operational reliability and redundancy. Generators, UPS systems and backup power are listed repeatedly as defining features of these facilities.
The economic stakes make proven resilience non-negotiable.
From risk to resilience: the role of testing
The report quantifies exactly what is at risk if that power infrastructure fails. When SEK 3,750 billion in national economic activity relies on continuous uptime, backup power cannot be assumed to be reliable. A generator that has never run under full rated load, or a UPS string that has never been tested, is an untested single point of failure sitting at the heart of “critical infrastructure.”
Load bank testing is how operators convert a specification on paper into resilience they can stand behind.
The opportunity ahead
The study notes that much of Sweden’s hyperscale capacity is still in the project or construction phase. Every one of those new facilities, and every expansion of an existing campus, requires commissioning and acceptance testing of its power systems before it goes live.
As capacity scales, the requirement to test and validate generators, UPS systems and switchgear under controlled, repeatable conditions also grows. Modern resistive and reactive load testing allows operators to commission and prove power infrastructure efficiently and safely, without relying on the live grid and without exposing real IT load to risk.
Crestchic’s entry into the Swedish market and its membership of SweDCI align directly with the growing need for load testing in Sweden. As the country’s installed capacity doubles and AI-driven growth accelerates, the operators delivering this critical infrastructure need a partner who can verify, beyond doubt, that the backup and redundancy described in the Impact Study will hold when it is needed most.
