Facebook`s data centre in Luleå, northern

data
Facebook’s data centre in Luleå, northern
Sweden, claims to be the greenest on the
planet. It’s already created a local boom,
but could it have wider benefits?
Words⁄Toby
Skinner
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“Sinc e Fa c eb
oo
kc
am
s a rule, feel-good stories
aren’t meant to come from
American megacorporations worth
upwards of US$40 billion
(NOK323bn). But try telling that to Luleå,
the coastal city in northern Sweden that’s
been sprinkled with Facebook’s stardust –
and hasn’t stopped smiling since.
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Since 2011, Luleå has been home to
Facebook’s only data centre outside the
US – it’s the largest in Europe and claims
to be the greenest on the planet. The first
of three server buildings – the next two
are due to be completed over the next few
years – is a 28,000m2 facility with tens
of thousands of blinking servers packed
together in long aisles. It’s powered by
to
l
u
L
,
å
e
hydroelectricity from the Luleå River, and
processes 10 petabytes of information
a day, or nine quadrillion bytes, which
translates as an awful lot of holiday snaps
and status updates. If you’re one of 282
million Europeans who use Facebook, all
the information you upload to Facebook
goes through Luleå. It’s fair to say that it’s
been a major coup for the city.
“Facebook coming was so huge and
so unlikely,” says Matz Engman, the
CEO of Näringsliv, an umbrella group
that links Luleå businesses and the local
municipality (the former own 51 per cent,
the latter 49 per cent). “Since it happened,
everything seems possible. We have the
happiest and proudest citizens in Sweden,
and it feels like a new era.” »
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hin
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Tens of thousands of servers
line the aisles of the Facebook
data centre in Luleå
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Rows of fans vent warm
air from the servers
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Data centres for Bitcoin miners KnC
Miner and British hydropower company
Hydro 66 have followed Facebook to an
area that now calls itself the Node Pole,
and is positioning itself as a world leader in
environmentally friendly data centres.
It’s had a knock-on effect, too. The
Luleå Science Park has seen more than 25
per cent growth since Facebook came to
town, while the number of applications to
study at the city’s technology university
has more than doubled in the past five
years. The population growth rate has also
doubled, house prices are the fastestgrowing in Sweden, and two new five-star
hotels have opened in the past few years,
with more in the pipeline.
So what did they do right? In 2008,
Engman became CEO of Näringsliv, with
a mission to build the area’s ICT sector,
which was growing fast to meet the needs
of the area’s traditional mining, raw
materials, forestry and energy sectors. At
the same time, he saw that data centres
were not only growing fast in the US to
keep up with frantic growth in the tech
industry, but that the data centre industry
was overtaking aviation as the world’s
biggest emitter of carbon.
There are now more than three
million data centres in the US alone,
using more than 100 billion kilowatts of
energy, and more than two per cent of the
planet’s electricity use now goes towards
powering the centres that store our
digital information. A recent Time article
noted that the iPhone in your pocket will
consume more electricity than the fridge
cooling your beer.
“I saw that growth, and the
environmental concerns, and it was a
light-bulb moment, if you excuse the pun,”
says Engman. “I was thinking: we have
very cheap, stable, 100 per cent renewable
energy here, good internet connectivity,
good infrastructure, and a cold climate
to help keep cooling costs down. It was a
potential win for any big data company –
the chance to cut down costs and emissions
at the same time. I just thought: we have to
go to the US and tell them.”
So Engman created a whole new brand
– the Node Pole – and embarked on a
Stateside charm offensive, going to »
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049
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Destination
Luleå
Eat
Deli/bakery/restaurant
Hemmagastronomi
was voted the best
restaurant in Norrland by
last year’s White Guide
for its local, seasonal
lunches. Another
favourite is Restaurang
CG, a homely, productdriven place doing great
local-sourced food.
hemmagastronomi.se,
restaurangcg.se
14 large companies selling Brand Luleå
but also Brand Sweden as an alternative
site for a data centre. Facebook had been
wanting to build a new data centre for
users outside America, and Engman’s
pitch was a compelling one.
“They were extremely tough
negotiators,” he says, “but as soon as you
sat down with them, they were one of the
best companies I’ve ever worked with.
There’s a very flat structure, and you don’t
have inaccessible bosses cloistered away
– I message Sheryl Sandberg [Facebook
COO] on Facebook the same way I would
anyone else, and she replies the same as
anyone else.”
In a year from March 2010 to March
2011, Facebook whittled 40 possible
locations down to two – Luleå and
Östersund – before finally giving Luleå
the nod after lengthy negotiations with
Engman and his team. “I think the clincher
for us was the fact that we’re a very
business-friendly city, with a strong IT
sector and a lot of local know-how already,”
says Engman. “If our group had been run
entirely by the municipality, rather than
a lot of savvy private business owners, we
wouldn’t have won this contract.”
But the main reasons were Luleå’s
natural advantages, from its river providing
limitless and cheap hydropower to the
coldest climate in Sweden providing free
natural cooling. That, plus a cutting-edge
Above⁄
The murals
in the office
are inspired
by the Aurora
Borealis
Left⁄
At 28,000m2,
the first of
three data
centres is
around the
size of three
soccer fields
design to naturally heat and cool the
warehouse, meant that the plant could be
70 per cent less energy intensive than the
average data centre.
Facebook has also made its design
open-source, meaning that other data
centres can copy it. “That way, it’s
become about more than just us,” says
Engman. “Hopefully we’ve done a service
to the world.”
The Facebook- Luleå partnership also
helped a mini-boom in data centres across
Scandinavia. Sweden is now ranked the
world’s third-best location for a data
centre, behind the US and UK, and other
tech giants have followed Facebook to
Scandinavia. Google – who have made
major investments in wind power – have
spent more than $1 billion in a facility in
Hamina, Finland, while Apple recently
announced it would build a state-of-the-art
facility in Jutland, Denmark.
The tech giants, it seems, are serious
about improving their green credentials. »
Do
Aside from simply
exploring the wilderness,
Luleå’s a great place for
driving on ice, whether
in a car, snowmobile
or – as of recently
– a hovercraft. The
Teknikens Hus is an
impressive and kidfriendly science and
technology museum.
teknikenshus.se
Stay
In town, the Elite
Stadshotell Luleå and
the new Clarion Hotel
Sense are the big-hitting
business-friendly hotels.
For something closer to
nature, the Furunäset
hotel and conference
centre is right by the
Pite River.
elite.se, clarionsense.
se, furunasethotell.se
n/
051
In the area
Tree hotels
The Norrland
Riviera
Piteå, less than an
hour’s drive south from
Luleå, is sometimes
called the “Norrland
Riviera” for its long
sandy beach and
pleasant archipelago –
though it’s as wellknown for having the
world’s only drivethrough burger joint for
snowmobiles. pitea.se
Jokkmokk
Jokkmokk was a transit
centre for Sámi refugees
from Norway during
World War II, and is
still an important Sámi
centre, best-known
for the 400-year-old
Jokkmokk Market in
February. In recent
months, Kitok’s absurdly
catchy hip-hop tune
Paradise Jokkmokk has
become possibly the first
Sámi viral hit.
destinationjokkmokk.se
052\n
Above⁄
All Facebook
data centres,
including
those in the
US, have
unique wall
art
Right⁄
The cooling
system on the
upper level
of the data
centre
According to Annika Jacobson, programme
manager for Greenpeace Sweden: “For a
long time, it’s been really important to
lobby the big tech giants like Facebook,
Google and Apple, because they’re such
big energy users – their energy usage is
comparable to a country like the UK.
“One data centre in Luleå doesn’t
solve a huge global issue, but it’s a step
in the right direction, and it shows that
Facebook is listening to the concerns that
we and others have.”
But the big winner seems to be Luleå
itself. According to Birgitta BergvallKåreborn, the pro vice-chancellor at
Luleå University of Technology, “A lot
of perceived negatives about this part of
Sweden have become positives – the cold,
the relative remoteness. As a community,
we’ve started to see what’s possible, and it’s
created a positive spiral – we’re looking at
ourselves differently.”
Bergvall-Kåreborn, who was part of
the Facebook pitch, has seen a boom in
applications to study in Luleå, which now
has 19,000 students in its four campuses,
including a space science campus at
Kiruna, a music and media department
at Piteå, and a wood tech and video game
engineering campus at Skellefteå.
“Facebook helped put a spotlight on
what we have up here. The university was
set up [in 1971] to secure competence in
the region and solve real-world problems,
and that’s still the case, even if things
have evolved from predominantly
teaching mechanical engineers. It’s easy
to get things done here, and there’s a lot
of support from local businesses and
the municipality. We’ve grown as an IT
destination, and become a hub for testing,
from digital services and networks to cars,
trains and even bio energy. With Facebook,
they knew that we already had a certain
know-how in everything from cooling
mechanics to data centre architecture.”
Unprompted, she then says the same
thing that Engman said. “We’ve realised
that anything is possible.” As a legacy of
Facebook coming, it’s not a bad one.
Norwegian flies to Luleå from Stockholm.
Book flights, a hotel and a rental car at
norwegian.com
G E T T Y, P A P H O T O S
The Treehotel complex,
an hour from Luleå,
was built in 2010 but its
uniquely designed tree
rooms still look strikingly
futuristic – from the
invisible “Mirrorcube”
to the “UFO”. Built in
a stunning forest, it’s
sustainable to boot.
treehotel.se