Facebook builds its first international data center in Sweden

Daily Mail : One doesn’t usually associate farming with the Arctic Circle, but Nordic countries are beginning to vie for a particular type of farm—computer server farms. Facebook, which now has more users outside the US than inside, recently started scouting European locations that could serve as data traffic nodes. The more data centers a company has the better. Not only do they serve as backup in case of a failure, such as the recent three-day collapse of BlackBerry’s service, but they also provide faster connections for the users nearby. Facebook said it chose Lulea, Sweden, for its first data center outside the US partly because of the location’s cold climate, which is crucial for keeping racks of high-performance computers cool. For about eight months of the year, the plant will be able to cool itself naturally by just using the icy outside air. In 2009 another internet giant, Google, turned a paper mill in Finland into a data center.