Plans have been announced for a new municipal data center located in the city of Cluj-Napoca, Romania.

The facility, to be named the North-West Regional Data Center, will facilitate digital services for multiple counties in the region and Romania’s Special Telecommunications Service.

No details were released on the intended completion date for the facility, its location, or its compute power. DCD has approached Cluj County Council for comment.

The data center is anticipated to cost 294 million lei ($65.7m) and is intended to accelerate the digital transformation of local government in the area.

Its construction will enable local authorities to deliver a range of services online, said the Ştiri de Cluj, boost the interoperability of different city halls and county councils, and reduce the overall processing time for requested documents.

The announcement comes amid increasing pressure on Cluj-Napoca’s administration to digitize its operations.

Last month, the municipality was forced to suspend its dispensation of paper fire safety and civil protection permits and authorizations after Romania’s national government updated the law so that all such documents and requests for them must be submitted electronically.

Cluj-Napoca’s city administration, meanwhile, still appears dependent on physical documentation, recently awarding a new contract to a printing supplier for 13 million black-and-white and 620,000 color pages.

Cluj-Napoca currently hosts eight privately-run data centers, according to DataCenterMap, including a small data center operated by Telekom Romania.

Plans have been mooted to expand this modestly sized market. In January, Balkan Green Energy News speculated that Cluj-Napoca was a candidate to host one of three underground data centers for the state-backed electricity company Distribuție Energie Electrică România. The city’s Technical University is also constructing an AI research center. Costing 70 million lei ($15.6m), the 107,639 sq ft (10,000 sqm) facility will house 144 GPUs.

Learn more about the data center market in Poland and Eastern Europe, and meet with other executives and experts from the region at the DCN Warsaw event later this year.