GLOMFJORD, Norway. At Nscale's data center here, some of the youngest people on site are not employees. They are students, 16 to 18 years old, from the local high school, spending work experience placements alongside the engineers, electricians, and operators who keep the site running.

It is one of several ways Nscale, now among Glomfjord's largest employers, is trying to make sure its presence in the town benefits residents as directly as it benefits the company. 

“I was born and raised here,” says Daniel Bergli, Nscale's director of industry partnerships and a Glomfjord native. “I have watched this town evolve from a hub of traditional industry into a place that also builds AI infrastructure now. What matters to me is that those are not two separate stories.”

Bergli is talking about Glomfjord's industrial history, which stretches back more than a century. The town's hydroelectric power station, commissioned in 1920, helped transform Glomfjord into one of Norway's great industrial communities, powering successive generations of zinc, aluminum, fertilizer and solar manufacturing. Today, Nscale's data center is part of that same industrial landscape, drawing on the same renewable hydropower. 

The facility itself has also been reinvented over time. It was purpose-built for recycling silicon carbide (SiC) slurry processing and opened in 2010 as a plant that recycled silicon carbide slurry from solar wafer manufacturing. After SiC Processing ceased operations in 2012, the building was later repurposed by Hydrokraft for Bitcoin mining. Arkon Energy later acquired the facility and, in early 2025, transitioned its computing capacity from Bitcoin mining to AI workloads. For a town whose industrial park has already lived through several changes in what it produces, this is simply the latest chapter, not an alien arrival.

“You cannot fly in experts and leave once the work is done,” Bergli says. “You have to grow the skills locally. That is exactly what we are doing.”

That approach starts with the contractors who help build and run the site. Nscale works with local electricians and technical teams, sharing designs and troubleshooting problems together rather than handing over a finished blueprint. Bergli calls it a living classroom: every project upskills the people doing the work, so the expertise stays in Glomfjord once the job is done.

It extends into the classroom itself, too. Nscale is an approved apprenticeship company in Nordland County, an area with a high proportion of students in vocational education. Nscale has already hosted work-placement students from local schools at the data center. Some assist with basic operations; others spend time with the mechanical and electrical team. The current program is a trial run, with the long-term goal of expanding it into a full apprenticeship program. Bergli hopes that one day every shift will include an apprentice.

“For local outreach, the best thing would be to have kids from even younger classes come and see it,” Bergli says. “That is what is missing: kids understanding what they could do here, and what that means for their own future.”

He points to a smaller moment that stuck with him. When Nscale moved one of its modular, containerized systems through a nearby town, local journalists called almost immediately to ask what it was. “People already know the Nscale name from the newspaper,” he says. “And for them, Nscale means local jobs and local upskilling. That is a good thing to be known for.”

Not every part of Nscale's footprint in Glomfjord is aimed at people directly. The data center also shares waste heat with a neighboring fish farm, part of a resource-sharing system in the Glomfjord industrial park that predates Nscale's arrival, and the region's cool climate keeps cooling costs down without extra energy use. But Bergli says those operational details matter less to residents than the jobs and the training. “If I saw an Nscale truck outside as a kid, I would want to know if there was a chance to get involved,” he says.

For Bergli, the ambition extends beyond one apprenticeship program. He wants Glomfjord's data center to become as ordinary a training ground as the fish farms and hydro plants that came before it. “It has local positives,” he says. “The ripple effect builds awareness and pride, and over time, that helps shape the workforce of this whole region.”

Have a question about Nscale's Glomfjord data center? Contact the community team at [email protected].