I'm surprised they placed one in Denmark since Netherlands and West-Germany (ie near Düsseldorf) would be much more central Europe for internet connections.
Actually I believe Apple is going for a long term renewable energy strategy like Amazon, Google and Microsoft. The additional electricity from wind(and maybe solar) can also be sold into the danish/European energy market.
The big picture I see, is that if you look at the Nordic countries, you see that Finland and Sweden has several (unpopular)nuclear power plants. Denmark has a mix of everything, mostly coal and wind. And Norway get most of its electricity from hydro.
Google has built a data center in Finland, Facebook in Sweden and now Apple will build one in Denmark. And I also believe Microsoft is building a data center in Finland.
But few are considering Norway and that may be because electricity in Norway is already very cheap and neither wind or solar can compete with hydro. And you want additional profit by selling energy to the energy market.
Selling electricity is a good sustainable long term investment.
There's wind and other renewables (wave/tide) in Denmark, but 48 % of electricity production is coal, so that's the marginal increase of production that Apple [edit: not Google] is actually going to use.
BTW, in Finland nuclear isn't that unpopular, there's currently a new site under construction.
(There is some trouble building it up, though: because the opponents of nuclear power will put just as much resistance to a site regardless of whether it is a 160 MW or 1600 MW plant, the planners make the site as big as possible, and the suppliers (in this case Areva) haven't considered this in the technology. The local nuclear safety authority is also ultra-safety-conscious, which is good in itself, except when slows down the deployment of a new, quite safe site so that the energy is bought off a Chernobyl-type thing near Leningrad).
It's flown under the radar, but Apple has gone big on renewable energy for datacenters since 2013. Idk why I sat on this article but I finally submitted today:
That might have a role, indeed. Denmark announced a few years ago that it intends to go 100 percent renewable over the next few decades (I think by 2040 or something).
Plus Denmark is able to buffer their unreliable wind energy with Swedish nuclear and hydro so even when the mills aren't turning they can import power to offset their coal when they're making green claims.
Might also be for economic/financial reasons. Denmark (unlike Germany and Holland) is not in the eurozone and also the German economy is looking like its getting a little bit unstable lately.
