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

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 Joh

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. “Compared with a traditional datacentre built with steel and concrete, we lower the embodied carbon of the full structure by three times.” With a complex the size of a football pitch, that is a lot of wood, but, says Wernvik, “the amount of timber one of our datacentres uses takes the Swedish forest about 10 to 15 minutes to grow back”. Continue reading...