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Your social media life to be stored in Barents

Facebook will build a data server centre in Luleå, attracted by the regions cold climate and low electricity prices.

Location

The social network profile of more than 800 million active users’ worldwide will be coordinated through the servers at the new data centre to be built just below the Arctic Circle.

Two or three enormous server halls will be built just outside Luleå in northern Sweden. The centre will be operated by Pinnacle Sweden AB, a company that according to Norrländska Socialdemokraten is closely linked with Facebook.

Preparations for the construction at the 35 hectare area started this week. The high costs of cooling the hundreds of thousands servers needed to store the social media updates of the fast growing social network site Facebook give preferences to locate the servers in the cool climate the Barents Region can offer.

Luleå can also offer low-cost electricity and the high-tech science research at Luleå Technical University.

The construction of the first server hall starts later this month and the second will be built in 2013, reports Norrbottens Kuriren.

A third hall could be built later. Each server hall will be 32.000 square meters, and the entire project is estimated to coast five billion Swedish kroner (€540 million).

The data centre will have 100 employees. BarentsObserver regularly post article-links at Facebook.com/barentsobserver 

Earlier this year, Google announced that they will place a giant server hall in Hamina in Finland, also that attracted by cold climate and low electricity prices.