Start: 2009-10-14 End: 2009-10-22

ISA together with regional partners from Skåne, Luleå and Stockholm carried out a successful trip to the US, meeting with amongst others Amazon, AT&T, Ebay, Microsoft, Apple, Cisco, Yahoo, Facebook and Sun.

We organized those meetings to promote Sweden’s excellent conditions to build green, energy-efficient datacenters. One of these days we also attended a seminar organized by the Silicon Valley Leadership Group on Datacenter Energy Efficiency (dcee.svlg.org).

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.

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 favor, 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, and we are involved in a number of discussions to look at concrete business opportunites.