Datacentres are deeply unpopular. Has Sweden made one we can all love?

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It is built of wood, resembles an Ikea and its power is totally renewable. Plus, it was built with the local community in mind. Is this facility in Falun the best datacentre in…

It is built of wood, resembles an Ikea and its power is totally renewable. Plus, it was built with the local community in mind. Is this facility in Falun the best datacentre in the world?

‘It was pretty cool, when they were building it. It looked like a very large Ikea,” says John Wernvik, of EcoDataCenter. He is giving me a tour of their facility in Falun, Sweden, which could lay claim to being the world’s greenest datacentre – although to many, that is a contradiction in terms.

One difference is immediately visible: this datacentre is made out of wood. Huge panels of cross-laminated timber arrived at the site pre-cut, and were assembled by crane according to instructions, like flatpack furniture. Aesthetically, this section of the datacentre is more like an Ikea before the fit-out, a cavernous, echoey, immaculately clean hangar. The wood is not EcoDataCenter’s only claim to sustainability; it is more than just cosmetic, says Wernvik, the company’s chief external relations and sustainability officer.

Datacentres have become a dirty word and a political issue in much of the world – especially the US, where opposition to them was said to be a factor in the recent midterm elections – but here in Sweden, not so much.

What’s remarkable is how little any of those arguments apply in Sweden, especially here in Falun, a former copper-mining town a few hours north of Stockholm. If your abiding image of a datacentre is something like xAI’s Colossus facility in Tennessee, built at lightning speed with little public notice, partly powered by banks of unpermitted, methane gas-burning temporary generators, releasing huge amounts of CO2 and harmful pollutants into the atmosphere and the community, then EcoDataCenter is practically the polar opposite. “I’m biased, but we believe that we build datacentres in a somewhat different way,” says Wernvik.

For starters, the company’s electricity supply is 100% renewable: 75% from hydroelectric power and 25% from wind.

Opening of the article, excerpted from The Guardian Business. To read the rest, open the article on the publisher's site.