Facebook to build server farm on edge of Arctic Circle

by liamssoft | October 30, 2011 at 12:06 am

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Facebook is to build a multi-million 'mini town' on the edge of the Arctic circle to house all its computer servers, which would us as much electricity as a town of 50,000 people.

The enormous server farm facility in Luleå, northern Sweden, to be announced officially on Thursday morning, is the first time that the social networking giant has chosen to locate a server farm outside the US.

"The climate will allow them to just use only air for cooling the servers," said Mats Engman, chief executive of the Aurorum Science Park, which is leading the push to turn the city into a 'Node Pole', luring in other international computing giants.

"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]."

Luleå is situated at the northern tip of the Baltic Sea, just over 62 miles South of the Arctic Circle.

Taking advantage of the rock bottom temperatures, Facebook plans to build three giant server halls covering an area the size of 11 football fields......telegraph.co.uk