The enormous server farm facility in Luleå, northern Sweden, to be announced officially on Thursday morning, is the first time that the social networking giant has chosen to locate a server farm outside the US. "The climate will allow them to just use only air for cooling the servers," said Mats Engman, chief executive of the Aurorum Science Park, which is leading the push to turn the city into a 'Node Pole', luring in other international computing giants.
"If you take the statistics, the temperature has not been above 30C [86F] for more than 24 hours since 1961. If you take the average temperature, it's around 2C [35.6F]."Luleå is situated at the northern tip of the Baltic Sea, just over 62 miles South of the Arctic Circle. Taking advantage of the rock bottom temperatures, Facebook plans to build three giant server halls covering an area the size of 11 football fields.
Even though they will rely on air cooling, keeping the servers humming will still require 120MW of power, enough to supply 16,000 detached homes, and costing some £45m a year. These power needs will be met by renewable electricity generated by dams on the nearby Luleå river.
"The Luleå river produces twice as much electricity as the Hoover Dam does, so 50 per cent is exported from our region. There is a surplus of energy, and we can supply more data centres in this area easily," Engman said.
He said Facebook's engineers had also been attracted by the reliability of the local power grid, which has been built to supply the area's thriving iron, steel and paper industries, and also by Sweden's dense fibre-optic network.
"Sweden has the highest penetration in the world of fibre to households, so it is very well connected," said Engman. "You can get very easily through Finland into Eastern Europe and Russia."Facebook becomes the latest to look to Northern Europe for server farms. Microsoft in 2007 said it was in discussions to build a sever farm in Siberia, but the deal has never materialised.
Google in 2009 bought a disused paper mill in Hamima in southern Finland, where it has been building a server farm, although it has been attracted more by the availability of cheap hydroelectric power.
Tom Furlong, Facebook's Director of Site Operations, is flying to Luleå today ahead of a press conference, when Facebook will give a full outline of its plans.
Mr Furlong's team looked at more than 40 sites in Sweden alone, before narrowing their list down earlier this year to a choice of Luleå and Östersund, a town in Central Sweden. Mr Furlong led development on Facebook's first server farm in Prineville, Oregon, which also relies on air cooling, relying mainly on the town's chilly desert nights and cold winters, only using cooling during the summer days.