French hosting provider OVH has started Alpha testing at a new facility in Quebec, Montreal, on a 60,000 sq m site.

The data center has its own private substation, two electric supplies of 120,000V capable of 120MVA each with one supply drawing electricity from an electric dam in the small town of Beauharnois, 300m from the building.

In an effort to target the US market, OVH has also set up a new network connecting the US and Europe with direct 100mbps connection.

OVH said the data center will offer dedicated servers and cloud computing that can reach 25 to 30% of the US market. The first phase of the build will target the East Coast of the US but OVH later plans to target West coast and central US, according to a post on the OVH forum.

OVH originally considered Boston and Philadelphia for its site but chose Quebec because it had the right mix of temperature and humidity and little risk of natural disasters.

The data center is housed in a structure built for Rio Tinto Alcan aluminium, and was previously used for melting and casting aluminium which means its shape, according to OVH, allows for natural ventilation.

It said the hot air between the two sides of the potroom, where pots of ore are processed, would be extracted out the middle of the roof. This works with OVH’s RBX4 modular data center concept designed for the fast implementation of a data center already used for its Strasbourg data center, Strasbourg 1, launched earlier this year.

Built in a cold climate, OVH said no heating is required with servers used to heat the ambient air.

On the forum, OVH said the Alpha phase will allow existing European customers to test operations in the US market with a dedicated server offered free for two to four months.

The Quebec data center brings OVH’s footprint to six data center, with a presence in France, Germany, Italy, Poland, Spain, Ireland, the UK and Netherlands and Finland housing more than 100,000 servers.

In 2010, WikiLeaks used OVH to host servers at OVH France.