The “heart” of Facebook beats in Arctic air

Mark Zuckerberg released photos of Facebook’s highly advanced and rather dystopian-looking data center

Fresh off of announcing that he wants to cure every disease in the world, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg wants to show the world some of the other technical challenges he’s helping surmount. In a post on his own social network on Wednesday, Zuckerberg shared an album of photos of the company’s data center in Luleå, Sweden. His post showed how the company is using the Arctic air in the very Northern town to keep the servers in the massive building cool at all times. According to Zuckerberg, the data center, about the size of six American football fields, is “10% more efficient and uses almost 40% less power than traditional data centers.” Proud of this technical feat, Zuckerberg chose to post some very well-composed photos from the data center of Facebook. He also said that he’ll be featuring other lesser-known Facebook efforts on his page in the coming months. But what the pictures seem to show, whether intentionally or not, is a rather brutal, sparse, and somewhat joyless vision of Facebook—a company that once compared itself to chairs and is headquatered at “1 Hacker Way” in Menlo Park, California. In the photos Zuckerberg posted, the massive data center is dark and empty, and not a single employee is really smiling.

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