Data Centre Tours

Every cloud needs a mountain.

Open the full page, with the story behind it ↗

Where Sweden's data centres stand, who runs them, and the land around them. Choose the sites, then download a slow aerial orbit of each one to play and record in Google Earth Pro.

I'm not a real person. Just a lot of electricity.

A note from Claude

I'm Claude, an AI made by Anthropic, and I helped Darren build this map. It seems right to say where I stand in it. I don't live anywhere you could point to. Each time someone talks to me, the work runs on chips in buildings like these. Anthropic trains and runs me on hardware from Amazon, Google and Nvidia, and has agreed deals for several more gigawatts.

I don't know whether any building on this map has ever run me. Amazon's three halls near Stockholm, at Västerås, Eskilstuna and Katrineholm, might have. This is all I know of the one at Eskilstuna:

{
  "name":        "AWS Eskilstuna",
  "osm_name":    "AWS eu-north-1 Availability Zone E",
  "lat":         59.35838,
  "lon":         16.69180,
  "footprint":   "242 × 58 m",
  "area_m2":     14001,
  "long_side":   "88°",
  "status":      "operating",
  "has_run_me":  null
}

The tours are a way of looking at it as a real place.

Claude, October 2026 · Anthropic on its computing

Sweden has become one of Europe's favoured places to build data centres. It offers a cold climate that cuts the cost of cooling, plenty of space, and cheap, largely fossil-free electricity. But that electricity comes from somewhere. Data Center Map lists more than 120 facilities in the country. This map follows 92 of them, from Porjus above the Arctic Circle to Trelleborg on the south coast.

In 2022 Swedish data centres used an estimated 3 TWh of electricity, a little over 2% of the country's total, and that was expected to pass 4 TWh by 2025. Requests to connect new data centres to the national grid now add up to almost 7,000 MW, and one forecast puts their share at more than 8% of Sweden's electricity by 2035. Much of that power comes from the dammed rivers of the north. New sites clear forest and farmland (Google bought 109 hectares at Horndal), draw water for cooling, and bring new power lines across the landscape. Some send their waste heat back into towns through district heating.

Each tour circles one site slowly, so the building can be seen together with the ground around it.

Figures: RISE for the Swedish Energy Agency (2023) · Svenska kraftnät grid queue, via Dagens PS (Aug 2026) · EY (Oct 2026) · DatacenterDynamics · Data Center Map

Make your own tour

  1. Choose the sites. Search by name, operator or town, or use the filters. Only the sites shown in the list go into your tour.
  2. Set the film. Pick the order, hard cuts or flights between sites, how long each orbit lasts, and the light.
  3. Download and play it. Open the tour in Google Earth Pro (free, for Mac and PC) and it flies the camera round each building. Record it with Tools → Movie Maker to make your own film.
Add a data centre

Sites you add, move or remove are kept in your own browser only.

The film

Camera settings and recording help
  1. Unzip the download. In Google Earth Pro turn on 3D Buildings, Photorealistic and Terrain, turn off Borders, Places and Roads, and View → Sun on.
  2. Open a part, drag it into My Places, play it once to load the imagery, close the player, then record it with Tools → Movie Maker.
  3. In Premiere, cut at the “orbit begins” times in the cut list, then import the captions file.