'Facebook effect' turns Swedish steel town into tech hot-spot

Facebook will double the size of its data centre in Sweden’s northern city of Lulea, raising its total investments in the region to about 8.7 billion crowns ($987 million), the company said on Monday. The campus, opened in 2013, is the first Facebook data centre set up outside the United States.

The expansion will make it one of the largest data centers in the world, said Node Pole, an investment hub, partly owned by utility Vattenfall, which seeks to promote investments in power-hungry data centres.

Sweden and its Nordic neighbours, with cheap electricity and low temperatures, are attractive for data centres, with many Silicon Valley giants and cryptocurrency miners rushing to move in.

Facebook will add a third building to the existing two at the Lulea data centre, which Vattenfall supplies electricity to.