Facebook To Build New Server Farm Near Arctic Circle | Hacker News Reader

Facebook To Build New Server Farm Near Arctic Circle

techiespider.com

23 pointsasdfassddfsad25 comments

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.

The grant might have been instrumental in getting them to bring the project to Sweden rather than any of the other Arctic circle countries though.

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?

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

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

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.

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

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.

A better article on the same subject: http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/10/27/us-facebook-sweden...

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?

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.

There already is a lot of energy-heavy industry here in the Nordics: paper and steel mills, nuclear power, etc. Having a couple megawatts worth of datacenters is really really minor thing.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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...

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

This kind of wilful inefficiency is killing US businesses.

Businesses aim to maximise profits, not Carnot efficiency.

Of course - FB just probably needs a server farm close to North Europe users. Still, it's a big eco-plus in my book.

Cooling will be achieved by placing a VLS (Very Large Stetson) over the data center.

'build there server farm'

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

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