Sweden Friends Facebook®

PALO ALTO, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Invest Sweden announced today that it successfully concluded its work with Facebook to facilitate the company’s investment in a new data center in Lulea, Sweden. Construction on the new data center, which will be Facebook’s first outside the US, is already under way. The Swedish location offers substantial cost savings, and an electricity supply that has the capacity to be drawn from 100% renewable resources. Invest Sweden, the official investment promotion agency of Sweden, assisted Facebook in selecting and securing the site for this new data center.

“We worked closely with Facebook as they thoroughly vetted several candidate locations from our growing inventory of dozens of available, pre-qualified sites, before finally deciding on Lulea. Our agency stands ready to help other international companies with site identification, acquisition, permits and other assistance.”

The Lulea location offers Facebook a number of important advantages. The robust power grid in northern Sweden enables Facebook to reduce its reliance on backup generators by 70%, and the climate in Lulea enables Facebook to replicate its unique data center cooling methods, which use 100% outside air. In addition, this new data center is Facebook’s first that will run on power that could be drawn from completely renewable resources.

With abundant hydroelectric power, Northern Sweden has some of the lowest-cost power available anywhere in Europe. As a natural, renewable energy source, hydropower is also carbon-free. Located near the Arctic Circle—at the same latitude as Iceland and Nome, Alaska—Lulea also offers natural climatic cooling, another major cost-savings for data center deployments.

“With low-cost electric power, low cooling costs and a favorable tax environment for businesses, Sweden is an ideal location for data center expansion. We have been working for more than two years to identify excellent sites throughout Sweden that can accommodate large data center infrastructure investment,” explained Invest Sweden’s Tomas Sokolnicki, Manager of the Sweden Datacenter Initiative. “We worked closely with Facebook as they thoroughly vetted several candidate locations from our growing inventory of dozens of available, pre-qualified sites, before finally deciding on Lulea. Our agency stands ready to help other international companies with site identification, acquisition, permits and other assistance.”

Sweden has Europe’s most robust fiber infrastructure. There is redundant national coverage through multiple network operators, and there are twelve Internet Exchange Points (IXPs) servicing numerous international carriers and service providers. Throughout Sweden dark fiber is available from over 100 suppliers.

Northern Sweden, with abundant hydroelectric power, is an ideal location for large-scale, enterprise data centers. The population centers in southern Sweden present a number of ideal sites for multi-tenant or colocation data centers where ease of access is a priority. Stockholm, the financial hub of Scandinavia, has especially good fiber routes to Eastern Europe, Russia and China. Gothenberg offers major industrial sites with power to spare, and Malmo serves as the fiber gateway to the UK and continental Europe.

About Invest Sweden

Invest Sweden is the official investment promotion agency of Sweden. The agency connects international companies with investment opportunities in Sweden, and offers comprehensive, one-stop investment consultancy services free of charge. Since 1996 Invest Sweden and its experts have assisted approximately 2,000 international companies doing business in Sweden.

Headquartered in Stockholm, Invest Sweden has offices in China, Japan, India, Brazil and the US. Additional information about data center deployment in Sweden can be obtained on our website: http://www.investsweden.se/North-America/Industries/ICT/Data-centers/ .