Giant data centers give Swedes job

..the climate is favorable, the European users nearby – and these centers also create a lot of job opportunities.  

  • This first building for Facebook Luleå Data Center of 28,000 square meters and the first of three planned data centers in the area. Photo: NCC/Gunnar Svedenbäck, August, 2012
  • Sweden’s investing a great deal in super data centers, and for good reasons, the climate is favorable, the European users nearby – and these centers also create a lot of job opportunities.
    According to the newly published report Data Center Risk Index 2013, Sweden is the third best country in the world in which to place a data center. Of the 30 countries investigated, only the U.S. and Great Britain were better countries for these kind of centers. Meanwhile, telecom giant Ericsson puts two of its new data centers in Sigtuna and Linköping.

  • Sweden is the (near) perfect place for giant data centers such as Facebook’s data center in Luleå, with the giant ”like” symbol (thumbs up) in ice at the front.
  • Important reasons for data centers in Sweden, are natural resources and the climate. First the great access to hydroelectricity, which provides environmental-friendly electricity, and second the heat from the computers need to be cooled off.
    ”Therefore, you want cheap albeit dependable power supply and cheap, simple cold,” says Gert Svensson, Deputy Director at the super data center PDC at KTH (the Royal Institute of Technology). Large data centers have been around for quite a while in businesses and authorities, but once computers got smaller in the 1980’s, the centers all but disappeared.
    A decade later Google kicked some serious life into the centers, and last year Facebook moved to Luleå, and the center there became Facebook’s first data center outside the U.S.

  • More data centers are in the making, among them a huge one in Upplands Väsby, north of Stockholm, the biggest construction of its kind since the Facebook establishment in Luleå. And these giant center provide people with work, not just at the center itself. ”The center has to be built and maintained,” says Svensson. ”And there are also more IT jobs added around the center.” Sweden is on the forefront also when it comes to teleheating and district cooling technologies. Soon Sweden will be able to recover the heat from the data centers and use it to heat apartments. ”Sweden will have yet another competitive edge here,” adds Svensson. ”Teleheating is unusual abroad and district cooling (the opposite of teleheating or district heating) is nearly unknown outside of Sweden.”
    Download the 36-page at Cushman & Wakefield: Data Centre Risk Index 2103

  • Just in case you're planning a move, Facebook Luleå Data Center is hiring. For more info, see www.facebook.com/LuleaDataCenter