Facebook Data Center Investment in Sweden Nears US$1B

Its CEO Mark Zuckerberg may be in the hot seat with regulators and the public on both sides of the Atlantic over user-data privacy, but Facebook continues growing the infrastructure that supports the world’s largest social network. The company is once again expanding its data center capacity in Europe.

Facebook announced on Monday a plan to add a third building at its already massive data center campus in Luleå, Sweden. It expects the 540,000-square foot building to start serving traffic in early 2021, according to a Facebook blog post.

Growth of its global user base and the expansion of data-intensive content, such as video and virtual reality, are driving the company’s massive infrastructure investment year after year. The money funds the build-out of data centers as well as capacity of Facebook’s global network backbone, including new submarine cables that link its data centers on different continents.

Luleå was home to the first data center Facebook built in Europe, launched in 2013. The planned third building will bring the company’s total investment in the campus to 8.7 billion Swedish Krona, or close to US$1 billion.

The expansion will nearly double the size of the Facebook data center campus in Luleå, according to the Swedish economic development organization Node Pole, bringing it to more than 1 million square feet.

Related:The Facebook Data Center FAQ

Today, Facebook has another European data center, in Clonee, Ireland (outside of Dublin). A third location on the continent – in Odense, Denmark – is currently under construction.

Most Facebook data centers are located in the US: in Prineville, Oregon; Forest City, North Carolina; Altoona, Iowa; Fort Worth, Texas; and Los Lunas, New Mexico. Additional US locations are under construction in Henrico, Virginia; Papillon, Nebraska; and New Albany, Ohio. Another Facebook data center is in the works outside Atlanta.

To serve its Asian customers, the company also occupies leased data center space in Singapore.