A former pulp mill in New Zealand could be turned into a storage-focused data center.

Ruapehu district council this week said it had received proposals for a biofuel production facility and data center campus at the former Winstone Pulp International (WPI) Karioi mill site near Ohakune in the Ruapehu district of New Zealand’s North Island.

The proposals would see the mill turned into two separate developments: a wood pellet production facility by Te Ara Hiko bio-coal, and a co-located data center campus operated by Data Igloo, a firm that claims to be developing “sovereign cold data centers,” focused on storage.

Little information about the data center plans is available.

Focused on backup, recovery, and long-term data retention, Data Igloo describes itself as a “cold data storage business” built in New Zealand for enterprise, recovery, compliance, healthcare, research, and AI training data.

On its website, the company said it is developing a “modular storage campus” for organizations holding large amounts of backup, records, recovery, healthcare, research, and AI data.

“The first campus is specified around a multi-exabyte deployment. As the data grows, the campus grows with it,” the firm says. Full details of what storage technologies the firm would use haven't been shared.

Winstone Pulp (WPI) closed the mill at 1002 State Highway 49 in 2024 after some 45 years in operation, citing unsustainable energy prices, resulting in the loss of 200 direct jobs and more in the community.

News that a wood pellet processing plant could be coming to the former mill site surfaced last month. The site is located next to the Tangiwai substation.

On LinkedIn, Data Igloo said the development “reflects our approach to one of the most pressing challenges facing the global data-center industry: how to accommodate exponential growth in data while managing the escalating costs of energy, infrastructure and computing capacity.”

“Data Igloo is addressing this inefficiency by developing dedicated, ultra-low-energy infrastructure for large-scale globally available data storage, alongside separate facilities for sovereign data processing and compute,” the firm continued. “Compute facilities globally can offload data storage workflows to Data Igloo and free up capacity in existing facilities all over the world.”

Ruapehu Mayor Weston Kirton said the proposals offer the “prospect of significant new investment and employment opportunities for the district.”

“Bringing productive activity back to Karioi is welcome news that could help rebuild confidence, create much-needed jobs and generate work for local suppliers, contractors and other businesses,” he said.