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conference-room
The first thing Jon Karlung remembers about the sealed room inside the nuclear bunker he renovated six years ago is its murky odor. It smelled like a crypt. Then, looking around, Karlung's crypt felt more like a flashback machine. "It looked like something from childhood," he says. "With these '70s green and orange colors. It was like a time capsule that had not been renovated or changed since the 1970s."
That bunker, called Pionen White Mountains is located just south of Stockholm. Nearly 20 years after Sweden's Civil Defense decommissioned it, Karlung converted it into a data center. A few years ago, it was briefly the most famous data center in the planet -- home to WikiLeaks.
Read More:[](http://stag-komodo.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2012/10/movie-computers/)[The Most Wonderfully Ridiculous Movie Computers of All Time](http://stag-komodo.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2012/10/movie-computers/)[](http://stag-komodo.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2012/11/movie-computer-two/)[Return of the World’s Most Wonderfully Ridiculous Movie Computers](http://stag-komodo.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2012/11/movie-computer-two/)[](http://stag-komodo.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2012/07/data-centers/)[Drones, Caves, and Toilets: When Data Centers Go Rogue](http://stag-komodo.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2012/07/data-centers/)And what a home it was; Karlung's internet service provider, Bahnhof, took the nuclear bunker idea and went all-in. It now looks like a cross between a James Bond lair and the eco-pod-filled spaceships of the 1972 cult sci-fi film *Silent Running.* Karlung, who worked briefly as a film archivist before getting into the data-center business, says that he immediately thought of putting plants in the underground caves to capture the computers-meet-plants vibe of *Silent Running.* "It had this mood and it had this atmosphere that I liked. It captures this atmosphere of growing something from outer space."
The bunker is owned by the City of Stockholm, which had previously leased it out for the occasional art party or rave, and even -- once -- a wedding. But Bahnhof felt that it could work as a data center -- it was big, had power, and was very centrally located, just a few kilometers from Stockholm's downtown. And it was secure. Located 100 feet below ground and shielded by 16-inch-thick metal doors, Pionen was built to survive a hydrogen bomb.
It took more than two years to blast out the 141,000 cubic feet of extra space that Bahnhof needed to squeeze its backup generators and server racks into the caves. It was an intense job. At one point a dynamite blast shot stone through the front door and into a car parked in front of the data center; nobody was injured.
And if you're lucky enough to get your own tour of the data center, you can see a decommissioned Dell PowerEdge web server, once used by WikiLeaks, on display at a Bahnhof bar (yes a real bar) in another of its Stockholm data centers. There's still a second WikiLeaks server, a database system that's offline in the Pionen data center. Bahnhof says it has about 200 Gb of data onboard.
Most often data centers are built in boxy warehouses, so Bahnhof stands out as perhaps the world's most stylish. In fact, it inspired Cisco IT Architect Douglas Alger to write a [book on the world's best-looking data centers.](
http://www.ciscopress.com/store/art-of-the-data-center-a-look-inside-the-worlds-most-9781587142963) "The idea that people were sitting in a design meeting and said, 'what we need for our data center is waterfalls,' that must have been a very fascinating discussion," Alger says.
We have a bit of a [soft spot](http://stag-komodo.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2012/10/movie-computers/) for movie supercomputers and James Bond lairs here at Wired, so we asked Karlung for some photos. He gave us a lot, including shots of the far-out data center, and a few never-before-seen pictures of the remnants of the old nuclear bunker that Bahnhof found when they moved in.
Above: This glass-walled conference room overlooks Pionen's data-center racks. It doubles as a [great place to trap Loki,](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AECmvEMKzgs) should he ever drop by and try to destroy the planet.
*All data center photos: Bahnhof*
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