Ægir Magnússon opened by naming the weather as the reason Advania builds its data centers in Iceland. "We utilize the bad weather we have here all year round," he said, and every facility the company runs is cooled by outside air rather than mechanical chillers. In under ten minutes, he set out how that climate, a young power grid and greenfield construction shaped a hosting business built for ASIC miners.
Magnússon, business development director at Advania Data Centers, gave this keynote at Mining Disrupt Covid Online 2020, held online July 22–23, 2020. Bitcoin traded at $9,530 when the session was recorded. On October 20, 2026 it was $81,849.
An IT Group With a Data Center Arm
Magnússon said he joined Advania in 2006, first selling managed services, before moving to the data center side. He described the parent brand as a large Nordic IT and managed services provider with around 1,500 employees in the Nordics and annual revenue of around 400 million euros, serving clients in the region and elsewhere.
The data center business, he said, focuses on crypto hosting and also on HPC and AI, with both Tier I and Tier III facilities. At the time it had 35 full-time employees and engineers, ran around 70 megawatts of power capacity, and reported data center revenue of around 50 million dollars for 2019. "Our main focus is a high density data center infrastructure," he said.
The history he gave was short. Advania acquired an Icelandic data center startup in 2011. In 2014 it opened a second site, Mjölnir, and growth followed from there. The original site in Reykjavík handles Tier III services; the Mjölnir site, near Keflavík International Airport, hosts Tier I space for cryptocurrency miners alongside Tier III facilities.
Why Iceland
Magnússon gave three reasons for the location. The climate suits data centers, and all of the company's infrastructure uses outside air for cooling. The power grid is young, which he said means very infrequent outages. And power in Iceland is cheap, costing less than in most other places.
the climate in iceland is perfectly suited for data centers since the climate is quite ambient
Ægir Magnússon · 3:09
He added that all of the cooling is natural free cooling and that all of the energy the company uses is renewable: around 85 percent [hydroelectric] and around 15 percent geothermal, by his figures.
all the energy we use in iceland is 100 renewable
Ægir Magnússon · 3:36
Tier I Space Built for Miners
The Tier I design is where the mining economics show. Magnússon said the free-air cooling setup reached a power usage effectiveness of 1.03. The design carries no UPS or generators, a deliberate choice he explained in one line, and uptime in 2019 was 99.96 percent.
we have a lower redundancy to reduce the cost which is perfectly suited for crypto operations
Ægir Magnússon · 4:22
For clients that need more, Advania had been running a Tier III facility at the Mjölnir site since 2019, and had converted one of the Tier I buildings by adding UPS and diesel generators for more redundancy. He described Mjölnir as one of the largest data center sites in Europe, with 70 megawatts running.
Greenfield, Modular and Room to Grow
Every Advania build is greenfield, he said, designed from the ground up and modular so the setup can follow a client's requirements. The standard ASIC design fits 11 megawatts into around 1,200 square meters, and a separate design suits GPU units, so the site can take different types of miners.
our design is all green field design so we build the data centers from the ground up
Ægir Magnússon · 5:10
At the time of the talk, ten buildings were in operation, one had been converted to Tier III, and work on an eleventh had started. The next lot was available or reserved, which he said makes expansion easy. Security runs around the clock, with gates around the premises and measures that follow the Tier III data center standard, and operations are certified to ISO 27001.
He closed with a short comparison of brownfield and greenfield sites. Greenfield, he said, means a higher initial investment and longer deployment, but it allows efficient cooling designed from the start, a choice of location in industrial areas rather than near homes where complaints can arise, and easy expansion.
The Case for Hosting
His pitch to miners came back to track record. The company was founded in 1938, he said, it has run mission-critical Tier III data centers for decades, and it has been setting up optimized crypto data centers for the last seven years. He presented that history as the first reason to choose Advania as a hosting partner, ahead of location and power.
we have started very early in the crypto mining industry back in 2011
Ægir Magnússon · 6:55
He also tied the location to output. Iceland's climate, he said, lets miners run on outside air at full capacity, and because every project starts as a greenfield build designed around the hardware, he argued that clients take on less risk than they would in a converted building. All of the energy behind it, he repeated, is renewable.
that ensures you know that your miners are performing as they at their max capacity
Ægir Magnússon · 7:41
Six years later, the mix Magnússon described in 2020, crypto hosting on one side and HPC and AI on the other, sharing the same cold-climate sites, is the ground Intelligence Disrupt covers. The conversation continues at Intelligence Disrupt 2027, March 22 to 24 in Irving, Texas.