Nasdaq to Relocate Trading Data Center in Sweden

The NASDAQ OMX Group will move its primary trading data center serving the Nordic and Baltic regions from Lunda to Upplands Väsby. Both towns are within 20 miles north of Stockholm.

The new data center is purpose built for Nasdaq’s needs within a new facility by DigiPlex, a U.K.-based data center provider. The DigiPlex facility, still under development, has access to 20 megawatts of power and can accommodate 65,000 square feet of data center space, with room for further expansion, according to the company’s website.

Nasdaq spokesman Richard Gaudy said via email there were many reasons for the move, “one reason being [that] contract expires with our existing data center provider, and we will be able to offer better services to our clients at the new data center.”

He declined to say how much space or power capacity Nasdaq was taking at the DigiPlex site.

Besides hosting matching engines for the Nasdaq stock exchange, the company’s trading data centers are used to provide colocation services to companies in the electronic, or high-frequency, trading space. These customers pay a premium for placing their servers in physical proximity to the matching engines, which gives them a sub-millisecond latency advantage over competitors located in different data centers.

Nasdaq offers a variety of services besides pure colocation, which is characteristic of modern stock exchange operators, which have also in recent years become technology services companies.

Like its peers, companies like the CME Group (operator of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange), or Intercontinental Exchange (owner of the New York Stock Exchange, ICE, and Liffe exchanges, among others), the company is leveraging the value of access to its infrastructure by providing various services around it. It can help with network topology decisions, private links to liquidity markets, remote hands services, managed hosting, disaster recovery, and even cold storage.

In addition to its own infrastructure, Nasdaq provides services hosted by Amazon Web Services.

In Europe, Nasdaq has points of presence at Equinix and Interxion data centers in London and in an Equinix facility in Frankfurt. Customers in the Sweden data center have network access to those locations as well.

Stateside, Nasdaq’s primary data center is located in Carteret, New Jersey.