Wikimedia Foundation, a San Francisco-based operator of Wikipedia and seven other online publishing projects, has secured free collocation space in Amsterdam.

EvoSwitch will provide more than €300,000 worth of in-kind bandwidth and hosting services in its carrier-neutral Netherlands data center to the non-profit.

This is Wikimedia's first expansion after years of leasing space within a St. Petersburg, Fla., facility - its primary site. The new space will make for faster access to the foundation's Web content for European users.

"The data center in Amsterdam is primarily about extending our ability to cache Wikipedia pages out there," Wikimedia spokesman Jay Walsh said. The foundation decided to locate in the EvoSwitch facility because it was in a favorable location and because it fit the organization's technical requirements.

"We needed to have a footprint in that part of Europe," Walsh said. "It made a lot of sense. They have a great system it was just a very natural fit for us."

A Wikimedia staff member will be working at the Amsterdam site, maintaining its 50 servers hosted there. The foundation keeps more than 300 servers in its primary data center location.

Walsh said it was not uncommon for companies to offer in-kind sponsorship to support the foundation's mission. "When we meet other vendors and suppliers, they say: 'How can we help?'"

Besides caching, its primary function, the EvoSwitch site will be used to back up Wikimedia content stored in the Florida data center.

Wikimedia was also attracted to the Amsterdam data center's use of clean energy and carbon neutrality, Walsh said.