Poland's NASK Builds National Data Processing Center to Safeguard Digital Public Services

Poland's national research and development institute NASK is constructing a National Data Processing Center (Krajowe Centrum Przetwarzania Danych, KCPD) designed to consolidate the country's most critical digital public services into a single, highly secured facility. The project addresses a growing fragmentation problem in which government offices and institutions operate their own separate server rooms under varying standards of security and modernity, creating inconsistent levels of resilience across the public sector.

The KCPD will host key state registries, the mObywatel digital identity application, online administrative service platforms, and healthcare systems including electronic medical documentation. By centralizing these services, the facility aims to ensure continuity of operations for citizens' everyday digital interactions with the state, from electronic prescriptions to official administrative matters, even during outages or cyberattacks. "Behind the digital services we use every day, there must be infrastructure that can be relied upon," said Radosław Nielek, director of NASK. "We want e-prescriptions, mObywatel, and administration systems to work not only under normal conditions but also when failures or threats arise. We are building the National Data Processing Center precisely to ensure continuity of operation for these services."

The project represents one of the largest investments of its kind for public administration in Poland, with 15 MW of power capacity already planned at the current stage, comparable to the energy demand of a small city. The facility will connect approximately 200 kilometers of its own fiber-optic network. The center will be built from modular components that can be expanded like building blocks as demand grows, with new segments added without interrupting operations of existing infrastructure. Each critical system, including power supply, cooling, and connectivity, will have a redundant backup so that if one component fails, another immediately takes over.

The facility will be protected to the same standard as other strategic state installations, with safeguards against intrusions, failures, extreme weather events, and sabotage attempts. On the energy side, the KCPD incorporates several innovative approaches. Almost all energy consumed by servers is converted into heat, which in typical data centers is simply released outside. At the KCPD, this heat will feed heat pumps and may in the future warm buildings beyond the center's premises. The facility will also draw on solar energy, with a portion of power from photovoltaic farms potentially used to produce hydrogen to support the center's electricity supply. Over time, hydrogen may replace traditional diesel generators, making it one of the first such projects among data centers in Poland. "The project combines the highest security standards with a modern approach to energy efficiency," said Marcin Sęk, deputy director of the Data Center Investment and Maintenance Division at NASK. "Heat recovery, the use of renewable energy sources, and preparation for hydrogen technologies show that critical infrastructure can be both reliable and environmentally sustainable."

The KCPD will also have a digital counterpart. Every element of the building and its installations has a corresponding component in a three-dimensional computer model, which will ultimately become a digital twin providing real-time visibility into the center's operations. This will help detect faults earlier, plan maintenance, and manage energy more efficiently before any disruption reaches users. The project is funded under agreement FERC.04.01-IP.01-0001/26-00 as part of the FERC.04.01 measure for strengthening cybersecurity and developing resilient data processing infrastructure, under the European Funds for Digital Development 2021-2027 program co-financed by the European Regional Development Fund. The total project value is PLN 1.6 billion, with co-financing of PLN 1,558,299,299.68, of which PLN 1,438,880,000.00 comes from the European budget (92.33%) and PLN 119,419,299.68 from the state budget (7.67%). The project implementation period runs from November 1, 2023, to May 31, 2029.