

Facebook To Build New Server Farm Near Arctic Circle - asdfassddfsad
http://www.techiespider.com/2011/10/27/facebook-build-server-farm-northern-sweden-arctic-circle/

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Too
And for some reason the swedish government is helping facebook in funding this
project. <http://www.dn.se/ekonomi/regeringen-ger-stod-till-facebook>, 15M USD
out of estimated total of 700M. Sure it's a small fraction and it will
probably bring many jobs to the city but it's not like facebook can't afford
it themselves and that this extra grant was critical for the project.

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Jach
I bet they get at least half of that back through taxes. (Assuming $6k per
month, with 300 workers mentioned in the article and 14 month completion rate,
30% one-time tax on it all, comes to 7,560,000.) It does seem kind of peculiar
though, makes me wonder if Facebook offered anything in exchange. Maybe some
sort of data flow/monitoring of Swedish users?

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rmc
It's almost certainly for the jobs. Sweden can market itself (to it's
populace) as a tech centre. Same reason the low Irish Corporate Tax rate

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mootothemax
According to Wikipedia, Lulea has a few other claims to fame, such as being
where the first GSM call was made in 1989.

Its year-long average temperature is 5C (41 Farenheit), ranging from -8C (18F)
to 19C (66F):

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luleå>

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phamilton
I used to live in Luleå. It is also tied for most sunlight in a year in
Sweden.

Fun fact: Durung the winter they put sign posts into the ice and drive right
over the Lule river. It makes for a great shortcut across town.

The article makes it sound completely remote, but it isn't. Google had an
office there for a few years. There's a decent university there. Though the
population is only 50k, it attracts everyone within 200km, so the city has a
disproportionate amount of entertainment and other industries.

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growdetroit
Pretty amazing. On average, How many days of sunlight did you have a year?

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phamilton
I only lived up there during a winter, but even during the winter it was
either snowing or perfectly clear. Very rarely did we have cloudy overcast
days.

It's not just the number of days though. It's the fact that for half the year
you get 20+ hours of sunlight a day.

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brodd
A better article on the same subject:
[http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/10/27/us-facebook-
sweden...](http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/10/27/us-facebook-sweden-
idUSTRE79Q2HR20111027)

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jakeonthemove
I'm not usually one to get into eco debates, but can anyone who's
knowledgeable in the field tell me whether it's a good idea to build heat
plants in places where they shouldn't be - I mean long term?

The way I see it now is that placing a structure which releases hundreds
(thousands?) of kilowatts of heat in the ocean, rivers or arctic ice (as an
example) is bad for the ecology - once the place heats up (and it will), it's
not going to cool down by itself. This has the potential to rise overall
global temperature if enough companies do this. Am I right or way off?

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cperciva
Given that the energy is coming from hydro power, there's no increase in heat
output: The gravitational potential energy of the water was going to be
converted into heating the water as it speeds up from flowing downhill and
then slows down from friction anyway.

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rdl
This has as much to do with using "stranded" hydropower up in the north as it
does with taking advantage of low ambient temperatures for free air cooling.

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alexchamberlain
Isn't Iceland trying to encourage companies to build datacenters there?
Geothermal energy and plenty of cooling to go round.

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brunnsbe
And some volcanoes and earthquakes as well. Not the most stable environment
for mission-critical servers. :-(

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alexchamberlain
Fair point... One could argue that a company as large as Facebook (or
Blackberry) should be able to cope with a whole datacenter being taken
offline.

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pferde
Why when they can save this particular headache by going elsewhere? Island
would have to _really_ make it worth anyone's while.

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pferde
This is how it's done. Compare that to building a new mega-datacenter in
Texas. (HP, I'm looking at you!)

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slashcom
Facebook's smart for taking advantage of the cold and such, but there are a
lot of factors that go into choosing a location. Tax incentives, proximity to
users, and a million other things I'm not aware of.

And while they will probably save massively on the electricity bill and carbon
emissions for this, it's not like energy is prohibitively expensive here in
Texas...

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DanBC
> it's not like energy is prohibitively expensive here in Texas...

This kind of wilful inefficiency is killing US businesses.

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jacques_chester
Businesses aim to maximise profits, not Carnot efficiency.

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jigs_up
'build there server farm'

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code_duck
I actually like "keep its hardwares cold". Point taken, that this is not the
most rigorously edited article.

