Facebook Data Center Latest Addition To Tech Landscape In Texas

HOUSTON: Social networking giant Facebook is building a massive $500 million wind-powered data centre in Fort Worth, Texas to support its 1.5 billion users.

A recent Greenpeace report praised Facebook’s transparency and green targets, but warned that “Facebook still faces significant challenges securing renewable energy for its first two data centres in North Carolina and Oregon“. The latest addition will be also be entirely run on renewable energy.

In a post, Ken Patchett, Facebook’s Director of Data Center Operations stated that the project has been undertaken to bolster Facebook’s growing global infrastructure, be it Facebook on desktop and mobile or Internet.org., reports Mashable. The social network also said it plans on creating at least 40 jobs in Fort Worth to help boost the local economy.

Efficiency Has Saved ‘$2B in Costs’. The Menlo Park, California, company’s only overseas data center is in Sweden. Now under construction, the wind farm is located on a 17,000-acre site 90 miles from the data center’s location. “Our data centers are important parts of the core infrastructure necessary to efficiently connect billions of people”.

The Forth Worth data center will be Facebook’s fifth. Both the Altoona and Lulea facilities are also powered by renewable energy. That’s why Facebook openly share there designs for there data centers through the Open Compute Project, which now has more than 200 members and thousands of participants, all collaborating on the development of efficient and sustainable data center technologies.

The project is expected to be delivering electricity to the grid by next year, after Facebook agreed to buy enough electricity from it to power its new data centre with 100% wind energy. “Yes, we can make that work even in the middle of the kinds of summers we have here in Texas“, he added.