The company boasts about using 100 percent renewable energy

Jun 12, 2013 14:42 GMT  ·  By

Facebook's already one of the biggest websites in the world. It operates at a massive scale and does everything it can to both optimize the site and infrastructure and speed things up for its users.

But optimization will only take you so far. At one point, you have to start adding more horsepower, meaning servers. And it's no good building huge, super-efficient and super-fast data centers in just one country if your users are halfway around the world.

Facebook has now flipped the switch on its first ever data center outside the US. Located in Sweden, where the cold weather helps with the cooling bill, the new data center will serve Europe and probably a large part of the rest of the world as well.

"Facebook's newest data center – in Luleå, Sweden – is now serving live user traffic from around the world," Facebook announced.

"The facility, which is located on the edge of the Arctic Circle, is our first data center outside the United States. And thanks to our innovative Open Compute Project designs and an abundance of renewable energy in the region, it's also likely to be one of the most efficient and sustainable data centers on the planet," it said.

Indeed, Facebook not only chose Sweden because of the cold weather, which will make it cheaper to keep all those servers cool, but also because of the big supply of renewable energy in the region.

Those are precisely the same reasons why Google chose Scandinavia for its own European data center.

Facebook boasts that the data center will use 100 percent renewable energy from the local hydro-electric plants. And because there's such a steady supply of energy, the data center users 70 percent less backup generators than a typical data center its size.