Meta/Facebook bought the land earlier this year, a decision announced in mid-October by the municipality of Esbjerg, a port city on the west coast of Denmark. “We are evaluating it for potential development,” a company spokesperson said.
It is unclear to what extent those evaluations are influenced by decision-making around Zeewolde. The spokesperson said Facebook is “simultaneously developing a number of sites around the world so that efforts and results in each location are independent of other locations.” But it seems that the building opportunities for one location increase as the opportunities for the other decrease.
After Zeewolde had given the green light for a data center in the polder north of the municipality two weeks ago, the Senate put a stop to this by means of a motion last week. The opposition wants the new cabinet to draw conclusions from its own doubts about data centers, as expressed in the coalition agreement. The Senate asks the forthcoming government to suspend the sale of agricultural land, which is currently still owned by the Central Government Real Estate Agency, ‘until a new cabinet vision for spatial planning and data centers is ready’.
Mega warehouses
Facebook has already built eighteen such mega-warehouses worldwide. Fourteen of these are in the United States. There is already one in Denmark, near the city of Odense on the island of Funen. This is often set as an example for the inhabitants of Zeewolde; the mayor already had plans for some kind of exchange to learn from the experiences there.
Facebook already bought the plot of land near Esbjerg in 2018, but sold it to the municipality in March 2019, when it seemed like they didn’t need it. That same year, Facebook teamed up with Zeewolde. So this year, Facebook retraced its steps, to the mayor’s delight. “We are thrilled that Facebook is back in Esbjerg and re-examining the possibility of a data center,” he said in October.
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