An Inside Look at a Filecoin Data Center

Just a short train ride north of Amsterdam, in the quiet city of Heerhugowaard, lies a facility that's anything but ordinary. It's here that Hidde Hoogland and his team at DCENT, the largest Filecoin storage provider in Europe, are building a piece of the future—a future where data is stored not in the hands of tech giants, but across a vast, decentralized network.

The futuristic facility includes a server room, maintenance room, and a battery room. Inside the server room, two imposing black cubes are fronted by sliding glass doors, each containing rows upon rows of server hardware, humming with activity. The high-capacity servers are connected through dark fiber links to Amsterdam— ensuring low-latency data movement within Filecoin’s decentralized storage network.

This summer, Hoogland gave us a tour of his storage provider facility, which contributes 175PiB QaP of storage capacity (that's over 183,500 gigabytes!) to the network and currently works with about 25 storage clients.

"This is a whole new space compared to what we were a few years ago," Hoogland said. “All the walls you see, the floor tiles, the roof, everything is completely revamped. We threw out everything we can find back to the concrete, the roof.”

DCENT's hardware setup is designed for both power and flexibility. The facility features rows of GPUs and high-capacity storage servers, all essential to the Filecoin network’s mission of providing decentralized, verifiable storage. DCENT’s hardware setup leverages AMD CPUs, NVIDIA GPUs, SSDs, and HDDs to support compute-intensive blockchain protocols, including archival storage for Solana.

Beyond raw processing power, DCENT's facility is also designed with a focus on sustainability. Hoogland showed us the battery room, and solar panel array, acquired through a grant from Filecoin Green. The small white room is lined with four tall stacks of industrial batteries that store solar energy during off-peak hours and reduce reliance on the grid during expensive peak times. "We put the battery systems to discharge during these expensive hours. So a few hours a day, the data center runs on battery power," explains Hoogland.

Hoogland said Filecoin’s vast storage network is the last critical ingredient in building the decentralized web. "The final piece to the blockchain puzzle right now is storage," Hoogland explains, "because then you can actually create a functional Web3." He argues that widespread adoption of blockchain technology hinges on the availability of robust and decentralized storage solutions, enabling users to securely store and manage their data in a trustless manner. With its vast infrastructure of computing power and hardware, Filecoin is well-positioned to meet this growing demand for decentralized storage. Hoogland says he believes that in time, many L1s will move to store their data on the Filecoin network. “We really believe that sooner or later, the pieces will fall into place and logical entities will be able to offload a lot of data.”

DCENT’s operations offer more than just a case study in running a successful Filecoin node—they provide a blueprint for future storage providers. By combining technical excellence with environmental responsibility, DCENT exemplifies how businesses in the Filecoin ecosystem can thrive. Watch the full documentary now.