The Big Chill: Scandinavia Hosts Tech Companies’ Data

Server farms – buildings house huge number of machines that support websites and internet activity – need to be kept cool. As a result, more and more high-tech companies are building data centers in the far north to take advantage of the naturally cool climate there.

For the Geo Quiz, we are looking for small Swedish port city, just south of the Arctic Circle.

It’s the location of a new data center being built by Facebook.

It will consist of three massive buildings to house servers — the machines that store all the information and process all the mouse clicks that keep “The Cloud” afloat.

This place is cold — it’s 550 miles north of Stockholm.

Final clue – this city is considered the capital of Swedish Lapland.

Luleå is the answer to the Geo Quiz.

Facebook isn’t the only high-tech company building a server farm in the north.

While the likes of Facebook and Google have headquarters in California, their servers can be anywhere.

And more and more, these server farms are being built in chilly, northern places — it’s one way of keeping energy costs down, because the machines have to be kept cool.

The countries of Scandinavia are now competing to attract this sort of server business.

The World’s Laura Lynch visited another server site — this one on Rennesoy Island in Norway.