The Big Chill: Scandinavia Hosts Tech Companies’ Data

By ⋅ May 24, 2012 ⋅ Post a comment
The Green Mountain data is located on the Island of Rennesoy, Norway. (Photo: greenmountain.no)

The Green Mountain data is located on the Island of Rennesoy, Norway. (Photo: greenmountain.no)

For the Geo Quiz, we are looking for small Swedish port city, just south of the Arctic Circle.

It’s the location of a new data center being built by Facebook.

It will consist of three massive buildings to house servers – the machines that store all the information and process all the mouse clicks that keep “The Cloud” afloat.

This place is cold – it’s 550 miles north of Stockholm.

Final clue — this city is considered the capital of Swedish Lapland.

Luleå is the answer to the Geo Quiz.

Facebook isn’t the only high-tech company building a server farm in the north.

While the likes of Facebook and Google have headquarters in California, their servers can be anywhere.

And more and more, these server farms are being built in chilly, northern places – it’s one way of keeping energy costs down, because the machines have to be kept cool.

The countries of Scandinavia are now competing to attract this sort of server business.

The World’s Laura Lynch visited another server site – this one on Rennesoy Island in Norway.


Discussion

3 comments for “The Big Chill: Scandinavia Hosts Tech Companies’ Data”

  • http://www.facebook.com/comqueen Diane Truckenbrod

    I have worked the computer industry for decades.  In my earliest job, I could not help but question why we didn’t just pull in the cold winter air in the cold months instead of running air-conditioners in January?  What did I know, I was just a 20 something.

    • RayDuray

      Facebook opened a new data center in Central Oregon in 2011. When the plan was announced, many of us asked about the sense of the Facebook planners who were purchasing electricity from a Wyoming coal–powered generation station 700 miles away to run air conditioning in winter when earth based heat pumps could have been powered by solar power. 

      But we were told we were naive. 

      Apparently someone with more engineering sense has been hired by Facebook in the meantime. 

  • JONATHAN EVANS

    We regard our facility as ‘The greenest data centre in the world’ as it has no carbon emissions and uses fjord water for cooling. Jonathan http://www.greenmountain.no