WikiLeaks, the international organization that publishes leaked documents classified by governments and corporations, has moved a portion of its servers to a data center in an underground nuclear bunker in Sweden, according to a Forbes report.

 

The facility, located in Stockholm and operated by the Swedish Internet and data center service provider Banhof, is a converted Cold War-era bunker, complete with generators designed to provide back-up power to German submarines. The news of WikiLeaks taking space at the facility, called Pionen, was first reported by VG Nett, a Norwegian news service, last week.

 

The Pionen data center is below about 100ft of bedrock in central Stockhom, according to Royal Pingdom. The 12,000 sq ft bunker was built to withstand a nearby hydrogen-bomb explosion. The Maybach MTU diesel generators provide 1.5MW of back-up power and the data center’s mechanical systems are designed to provide as much cooling capacity.

 

WikiLeaks has been using hosting services of PRQ, a Sweden-based provider headed by Gottfrid Svartholm and Fredrik Neij, co-founders of Pirate Bay, a BitTorrent file-sharing website, according to TorrentFreak, a BitTorrent news blog. 

 

Pirate Bay also used to be in a data center built in a Cold War-era nuclear bunker in the Netherlands called CyberBunker, which was providing connectivity services to the site. In May, DatacenterDynamics reported that a German court had ordered CyberBunker to stop its services to the website. 

 

The Pirate Bay later signed on to hosting services of Pirate Party, a liberal Swedish political party whose platform is reform of copyright and patent laws. WikiLeaks has also recently become one of Pirate Party’s hosting clients. 

 

WikiLeaks has been under major pressure by the US government since July, when it published tens of thousands of classified documents about the ongoing war in Afghanistan. Its founder Julian Assange is currently being investigated in connection to allegations of rape by two women. Assange’s lawyer told the New York Times that his client was innocent.