Interesting that AWS didn't chose to place their DC's at the "Node Pole" (http://thenodepole.com) in the northern parts of Sweden where FB have theirs.
Most likely to be closer to the capital Stockholm, main Internet exchange and startups in Sweden. Further more you will have better latency to the rest of Nordics closer to Stockholm.
Why would they need to be close to 'a large pool of talent' in order to run a bunch of hosting? It doesn't take that many people to run a hosting facility, the ones I'm familiar with are mostly deserted. They take people to set up and a large amount of capital but once that's done it takes very few people to run.
Even the (very large) Google data centers typically do not employ more than 100 people, that's 30 people over 3 shifts and some overhead.
They aren't actually located in Stockholm, but close enough to use resources from the Stockholm Area. Supposedly the DCs will be located in Västerås, Eskilstuna and Katrineholm[0].
