Facebook has more users in EMEA territories than the US-- and confirms the opening of a huge data centre in Luleå, Sweden.
Speaking to the Financial Times, Facebook director of site operations Tom Furlong says "...most of our users are now outside the US.”
The Luleå facility will be first non-US based Facebook server farm (it has sites in California, Virginia and Oregon) and will consist of three 28000-square meter buildings housing all data processing from EMEA territories.
Being 100km south of the Arctic Circle, the climate will take care of cooling down servers, while hydroelectric energy satisfies all power needs. Facebook is also tweaking servers to reduce power usage, stripping down superfluous elements such as video cards.
Facebook is not the first company moving towards the North, lured by promises cheap electricity and natural "cooling"-- Google is opening €200M server hall in Hamina, Finland, inside what was once a paper mill.
Of course, there's yet another reason making the Nordic nations attractive as data centre locations-- geographic proximity to the Russian market.
