A data centre fire in Almere disabled a university, a transport emergency system, and the assumption that physical infrastructure is someone else’s problem

TL;DR
A fire at a NorthC data centre in Almere knocked Utrecht University offline, disabled public transport emergency communications across Utrecht province, and triggered an NL-Alert across Flevoland. The incident exposes the physical fragility beneath the digital infrastructure the Netherlands is spending billions to expand, and the failure of organisations to plan for the possibility that a single data centre might go down.

A fire at a data centre in Almere on Thursday morning knocked a university offline, disabled the emergency communication system for public transport across an entire province, triggered an NL-Alert to residents across Flevoland, and required a crash tender from Lelystad Airport to cool a diesel tank on site.

The fire broke out at approximately 8:30 a.m. at the rear of a facility operated by NorthC Datacenters, a Dutch colocation provider that runs 25 data centres across the Netherlands, Germany, and Switzerland. All personnel were evacuated safely and no injuries were reported, but the cascade of disruptions that followed a single building fire exposed the physical fragility that sits beneath the digital infrastructure the Netherlands is spending billions to expand.

The fire

The fire was classified as a major incident within 40 minutes of breaking out, with emergency services escalating to GRIP 1, the classification that activates coordinated regional response across all emergency services. A dense smoke plume prompted the NL-Alert, the Dutch government’s emergency broadcast system, warning residents in the surrounding area to close windows and doors and turn off ventilation.

The fire department requested a crash tender from Lelystad Airport to cool a diesel fuel tank at the site as a precaution. NorthC chief executive Alexandra Schless confirmed that all personnel were evacuated in time but said the company could not yet determine the cause of the fire or the extent of damage to infrastructure. The emergency electricity installation at the data centre has been classified as lost.

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NorthC, which was formed in 2019 through the merger of The Datacenter Group and NLDC, operates colocation facilities designed to Tier 3+ standards, meaning all critical systems including uninterruptible power supplies, cooling, and emergency generators are fully redundant. The company was acquired by Antin Infrastructure Partners from DWS in a deal that positioned NorthC as a platform for growth across European enterprise colocation. The Almere facility, located on the Rondebeltweg in the Sallandsekant industrial estate, serves clients in education, research, government, and healthcare. Its client list includes SURF, the Dutch organisation that provides ICT infrastructure for the country’s education and research sector, which means the fire’s impact extended far beyond the building itself.

The cascade

Utrecht University, which hosts several servers at the NorthC Almere facility, said the fire was having “a big impact,” with students and staff unable to log in to university websites and applications. SURF confirmed that a number of its member institutions, spanning universities and research organisations, had infrastructure running in the affected data centre and warned that institutions could experience disruptions to network services and applications. Infomedics, which processes billing on behalf of healthcare providers, was also affected.

The most consequential disruption was to public transport. Transdev, which operates bus and tram services across Utrecht province, reported that drivers lost contact with the Regiecentrum Openbaar Vervoer, the regional control centre that coordinates emergency response and daily operations for public transport. The control centre’s servers were hosted at the NorthC Almere facility and had not been migrated to a backup location. Without the connection, drivers could not communicate normally with the control room, and the in-vehicle emergency button, the system that allows a driver to call for immediate assistance in a safety incident, was not functioning. The Netherlands has been positioning itself as a leader in AI infrastructure, striking deals with Nvidia for supercomputing hardware and investing more than 200 million euros in artificial intelligence. But the Almere fire demonstrated that the physical layer on which all digital infrastructure depends, the buildings, the power systems, the cooling, the diesel generators, remains vulnerable to the oldest risk in engineering: fire.

The precedent

Data centre fires are rare but not unprecedented, and each incident has exposed the same structural problem: physical redundancy is expensive, and the organisations that depend on data centres often assume a level of resilience that the contracts and architecture do not guarantee. In March 2021, a fire at OVHcloud’s Strasbourg campus destroyed the SBG2 facility entirely and damaged SBG1, taking millions of websites offline and permanently destroying data for customers who had not purchased off-site backup. The investigation found that the SBG2 building used flammable wooden ceilings over basement power rooms and lacked automatic fire suppression. In 2023, a water leak at Global Switch’s Paris facility triggered a battery fire that caused an outage across Google’s European operations. Dutch technology leaders have argued that Europe can lead in AI applications even without manufacturing its own hardware, but the Almere fire illustrates that leadership in applications requires reliability in the physical infrastructure those applications run on.

The common thread across data centre fire incidents is electrical failure. Between 2014 and 2023, at least 22 significant data centre fire or explosion events were reported globally, and the majority were caused by battery failure, UPS malfunction, or electrical faults. NorthC has not identified the cause of the Almere fire, but the loss of the emergency electricity installation suggests the power infrastructure may have been involved. The Netherlands has committed a billion euros to a high-technology fund aimed at strengthening the country’s position in critical technologies including AI, semiconductors, and quantum computing. The fund’s thesis is that investment in advanced technology creates strategic resilience. The Almere fire suggests that resilience also requires investment in the unglamorous physical infrastructure that technology depends on: fire suppression, geographic redundancy, backup failover, and the operational discipline to ensure that critical systems like public transport emergency communications are not hosted in a single facility without a tested fallback.

The question

The Netherlands is building capabilities in neuromorphic computing, AI infrastructure, and advanced semiconductor research, positioning itself as one of Europe’s most important nodes in the global technology supply chain. The country hosts ASML, the sole manufacturer of extreme ultraviolet lithography machines, and has attracted data centre investment from Google, Microsoft, and Meta. The data centre sector has grown rapidly, driven by cloud migration and AI workloads, and the Dutch government has responded with a mix of investment incentives and regulatory scrutiny, including a moratorium on new hyperscale data centre construction in parts of the country where energy and land constraints have become politically contentious.

The Netherlands has positioned ethical AI and climate technology as the foundations of its innovation strategy, but the Almere fire raises questions about whether the physical infrastructure supporting that strategy is keeping pace with the ambition. A single building fire at a single colocation provider disabled a university, disrupted healthcare billing, and, most critically, knocked out the emergency communication system for an entire province’s public transport network. The Transdev revelation, that the servers for the emergency button system had not been moved to a backup location, is the detail that should concern every organisation with infrastructure in a single data centre. NorthC builds to Tier 3+ standards. Its personnel were evacuated safely. Its chief executive responded publicly within hours. The company did what a competent operator does when a fire breaks out. The problem is not that the data centre failed. The problem is that the systems built on top of it had not planned for the possibility that it might.

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