Facebook has just announced the opening of a new data center in the frosty climes of Lulea, in Northern Sweden, right on the edge of the Arctic Circle, as it looks for novel ways to reduce operating costs whilst boosting its environmental friendliness.

The new data center becomes the first such facility that Facebook’s opened up inside Europe, and is located some 600 miles north of the Swedish capital, Stockholm. More than that however, it’s also the first Facebook data center that will use servers designed entirely by its own engineering team.

The icy wastes of Scandinavia might seem like an odd place to stick their data center, but Facebook insists the location is an advantageous one. For one thing, the most obvious benefit is the temperature – for roughly ten months a year Lulea is bitterly cold outside, with winter temperatures often dipping below minus forty degrees C, and these chilly winds can be drawn into the building to help cool down the thousands of servers packed inside it. Additionally, any excess heat generated by the servers can be used to heat the office, says Facebook.

Aside from that, the facility also draws its power from nearby hydro-electricity energy sources, which means it’s the company’s most environmentally friendly data center to date. These hydro-electric generators are said to be so reliable that Facebook can reduce by 70% the number of backup generators it needs to maintain. In addition, Facebook says that Sweden’s super fiber optic network makes the country an excellent choice to locate its first overseas data center.

The Lulea facility is already up and running, the result of Facebook’s two-year long Open Compute initiative, during which it designed its own specifications for its servers, openly sharing them with anyone who showed an interest. Rather than buying servers directly from hardware suppliers, Facebook did away with a great deal of hardware and software it deemed unnecessary, before paying to have its custom-made designs built from scratch.

Facebook stressed the importance of the Open Compute Project in its statement announcing the new facility:

“Our commitment to energy efficiency is also evident inside Luleå’s giant data halls. Nearly all the technology in the facility, from the servers to the power distribution systems, is based on Open Compute Project designs. This Facebook-founded initiative encourages the development of “vanity-free” hardware designs that are highly efficient and leave out unnecessary bits of metal and plastic. These designs are then shared with the broader community, so anyone can use or improve them.”

Most notable is the facility’s extremely low Power usage Effectiveness (PUE) rating of just 1.07, which means that the servers consume just 1.07 watts of energy for every watt they actually need. In the future, Facebook plans to install a PUE monitor in the facility and make this accessible on the web, so that people can see how its data center performs in real-time

The Swedish facility adds to Facebook’s existing data centers in North Carolina and Oregon. The company plans to have a fourth data center up and running in Iowa in 2014, which it promises will be “the most advanced energy efficient facilities of its kind.”

Images courtesy of Beta Dawn