Luleå Science Park

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As the group headed south from Kukkolaforsen, a two-hour trip took us to the city of Luleå. The city of Luleå is home to the science park responsible for bringing Facebook’s newest datacenter to date back in 2011. The first presenter, CEO Matz Engman noted that “Facebook has put them on the map, in the future we will be a global benchmark, a node for this kind of – technology intense and electricity demanding operations.”

So how is the Luleå Science Park attracting companies to come to northern Sweden? In general, the city is a growing city with cool climate, clean and abundant energy, and talented workforce. In order to host new companies and international companies at the same time, the city has 5-star hotels and fine dining to offer visitors.

One of the main objectives for CEO Matz Engman was increasing the public relations budget. The most influential strategy to help the northern region was the creation of The Node Pole (www.thenodepole.com), which consists of the municipalities of Luleå, Boden, and Piteå. The concept was built upon the advantages of bringing a data center and/or high tech industry business into these regions. (http://youtu.be/gpCcij4wPmw) This proved to be the successful immediately.

Once the presentation was completed it was time to go visit Facebook’s datacenter site #1. Currently a site#2 is being built adjacent to the current datacenter. Due to “managers not on site” we could not go inside the datacenter and were only brought to the outside of the building to take a few photos. Although it was disappointing not to be able to go inside, it was a pleasant experience to be close enough to the datacenter of the world popular Facebook.