Facebook plans to build a new server farm on the edge of the Arctic Circle to improve performance for European users. The huge server farm facility will be located in Luleå, northern Sweden which is 60 miles south of the Arctic Circle.
"The climate will allow them to just use only air for cooling the servers," said Mats Engman, chief executive of the Aurorum Science Park. "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)."
Facebook plans to build 3 giant server halls covering an area the size of 11 football fields. Each building will be 300,000-square feet in size and the project is scheduled for completion by 2014. Even though they will rely on air cooling, keeping the servers running will still require 120MW of power and cost £45m a year. Facebook currently stores data at sites in California, Virginia and Oregon and is building another facility in North Carolina and has 800 million users world-wide.
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