Successful datacenter meetings in USA

Sweden has excellent conditions for hosting the world's most energy efficient data centers. Invest in Sweden Agency together with regional partners from Skåne, Luleå and Stockholm just came back from the US, where we met with amongst others Amazon, Ebay, Microsoft, Apple, Cisco, Yahoo, Facebook and Sun. We organized the meetings to promote Sweden's excellent conditions to build green, energy-efficient datacenters. We also attended a seminar organized by the Silicon Valley Leadership Group on Datacenter Energy Efficiency.

There is a strong drive in the US to be energy efficient, with heavy pressure from the government and a high interest from the private sector. This becomes evident when talking to one of the companies whose annual electricity bill is 1.3 billion USD!

In the datacenter world, one of the main drivers is to spend less on electricity. One way to do so is to spend less on cooling the datacenter, which normally is a very high, unnecessary cost. Sweden's climate works for once in our favour, allowing datacenters to use so called free cooling a large part of the year. Additionally, Sweden is at the forefront of actually taking waste heat generated by a datacenter, which in the rest of the world is simply ventilated out of the building, to input as energy into our district heating networks thus potentially saving in the order of 25-30%.

In conclusion, our meetings were very successful and appreciated. Several companies are in the process of deciding where their next European datacenters should be established, so we hope to be able to follow up with concrete business opportunites.

More information can be found on our website, www.isa.se/datacenters or from Tomas Sokolnicki, tomas.sokolnicki@isa.se , 08-402 78 31 and 070-642 78 31.