Facebook Inc (FB): This New Facility is No Swedish Meatball

Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB) is an American-made company with an international reach, with about 1 billion users – or three times more than the entire population of the U.S., or one in every six people on the planet. And Facebook not only has that many users, but it also has compiled thousands if not millions of pieces of data and information about everyone of those billion users. That data is gathered and needs to be stored somewhere, so Facebook has built a still-growing network of data centers that will hold and keep the information safe, secure and (hopefully) free from too much NSA snooping or from malicious bugs that would love nothing more than to extract much of that data and use it.

Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB) has had two data centers in the U.S. up and running for a while now, but capacity has been stretched, so the company has been working on two more data centers, and one of them just went live this week. The noteworthy thing about this data center is that it is the only one of the four currently in existence or under construction to be outside of the home country. The fourth data center is due to go online early next year in Iowa. Facebook has a decent user presence in Europe, so it would make sense that the company would eventually post a data center in the vicinity of Europe. Is Scandinavia close – and cold – enough?

It is a little town on the Baltic Sea called Lulea, Sweden, which  is home to the newest Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB) data center, and while the location seems odd, Facebook  can easily justify the spot in real-estate terms – after all, it is about location, location, location. One of the big draws for Facebook to this spot is the fact that the town is just about 60 miles south of the Arctic Circle, so the air is cold virtually year round to keep the large servers cool and to better preserve the information inside. Second, the office can stay warm simply by using the excess heat that the servers generate.

And knowing Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB) like you do, you would think it would be environmentally friendly with its energy use, right?