Norwegian software firm Opera, which develops the world’s most popular mobile browser, has opened a datacentre in Iceland to help it compress and manage all the web traffic from its millions of users.

November 1 marked the first day of operation at Opera’s Icelandic data centre, known as Thor, which will compress web traffic for more than 71 million monthly users of Opera Mini. These users view more than 36.9 billion pages per month, which translates into more than 4.9PB of data – 245 times the size of the US Library of Congress.

The Opera Mini technology, which compresses web traffic on the fly, requires data centres to handle all the processing, which in turn equals massive requirements for power and cooling. Opera said the stable supply of geothermal power and natural cooling in Iceland make for the ideal location of a data centre.

Opera Mini compresses data by up to 90 per cent before sending it to the phone, resulting in more rapid page loading and more web per MB for the end user, the company said.