Facebook To Build Second European Data Centre In Sweden

Facebook has announced plans to build a second data centre in Sweden, less than a year after opening its first European facility in the arctic town of Luleå. It sits in the area known as The Node Pole, where 100 percent of electricity is derived from renewable sources.

“The recent developments, with today’s announcement from Facebook as the most recent example, confirm our firm belief that our region is an optimal locality for these types of establishments,” said Erik Lundström, newly appointed CEO of The Node Pole.

Winter is coming

Luleå is a coastal town in the arctic north of Sweden, home to the Luleå University of Technology – an institution with a long history of innovation. The region benefits from political stability, low property prices, access to skilled workforce and cold climate which results in lower cooling expenses.

Conveniently, the Swedish construction giant NCC has already created a special data centre design division based in Luleå.

The ‘Luleå 2’ data centre will be the first Facebook facility to employ the Rapid Deployment Data Centre (RDDC) designs, which were showcased at the Open Compute Summit in January. They involve the use of pre-made modular sections that are assembled on-site.

“Just as the great Swedish company Ikea revolutionized how furniture is designed and built, we hope that Luleå 2 will become a model for the next generation of data centres,” said Facebook.

Furthermore, all of the racks, servers, storage systems, power distribution networks, and other components will be built to Open Compute Project (OCP) specifications.

Luleå 2 will be located adjacent to Facebook’s existing data centre which consists of three 300,000 square foot buildings and has achieved impressive Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) of approximately 1.05.

Since 2011, when Facebook first announced plans to build a European data centre in Sweden, the country has effectively doubled its capacity for Internet traffic.

This latest announcement is great news for The Node Pole, an area which has been promoted by the Swedish government as the perfect location for IT infrastructure. Google had recently announced plans to buy all electricity produced by four wind farms located in The Node Pole to power its nearby data centre in Hamina, Finland. Meanwhile KnC Miner is building a 10MW data centre in the same region, dedicated to bitcoin mining.

“The announcement of Luleå 2 should be seen as a further endorsement of the skills, talent and vision of the people of Luleå and Sweden. The city and the country have positioned themselves as leaders in the data centre industry and they are rightly gaining global recognition,” added Facebook.

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