14 DAY TRIAL // Facebook is building a huge data center site in northern Sweden, very close to the Arctic circle. The data center will be the company's first outside of the US and will be massive.
Facebook is taking advantage of the cold climate of the area to keep the thousands of servers cool without wasting too much energy. The region's cheap and clean hydroelectric energy is also a draw for the company.
Luleå, Sweden has been chosen as the location of Facebook's first data center outside of the US and one of the company's largest to date.
Facebook will be building three halls for the servers, eventually covering an area the size of 11 football fields.
All of these servers are going to eat up a lot of electricity, to power them but also to keep them cool.
By using the local cool climate in its favor, Facebook plans to only use outside air to keep the data centers operating at an optimum temperature.
With an average year round temperature of only 2C, 35.6F, Luleå is one of the coldest places in Sweden and is ideal for data centers.
Even without active cooling, all of those servers will be consuming quite a lot of electricity, about 120MW, enough for a small town.
But the region is supplied by hydro-electric dams on the Lule river, which generate about 10 percent of Sweden's electricity needs. This factored in when choosing the site as well as the fact that the electricity infrastructure in the area is very stable.
Of course, Sweden is also one of the most connected countries in the world, so internet connectivity and bandwidth won't be a problem in the region.
Facebook is investing several hundreds of millions of dollars in the project. The first phase will be completed next year and will start supplying users sometime in the first half of 2013.