Facebook Establishes Fort Worth Data Center in Texas – iamWire

The Menlo Park, California, company’s only overseas data center is in Sweden.

It will also be powered entirely by renewable energy as a result of a new, 200-megawatt wind project now under construction on a 17,000-acre site in nearby Clay County.

“Facebook’s new goal of using 50 percent renewable energy and commitment to powering its Texas data center with clean wind power demonstrates the kind of transparency needed to show that it is making steady progress toward its goal of using 100 percent renewable energy”, David Pomerantz, senior climate and energy campaigner with Greenpeace, said in a statement.

Google is also one of the major investors behind the planned development of an undersea power line to connect offshore wind farms to the United States east coast – the first construction phase of which is expected to begin off the New Jersey coast in 2016. While the company isn’t disclosing full cost and capacity plans for the data center, the spokesperson said that “we have publicly committed to at least 40 full-time jobs and $500 million in investment”. The cost of the data center will be almost $1 billion.

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 company recently announced that the new wind powered data center is currently being constructed on a 111 acre estate which includes three buildings of 250,000 sq-ft.

“We put a lot of effort into choosing where to locate a facility like this”, Patchett noted. Both the Altoona and Lulea facilities are also powered by renewable energy. Patchett explains the upcoming project on this new data center’s Faceboook page itself.

The Fort Worth location houses the latest addition to the Facebook infrastructure, the fifth data centre. Yosemite is a system-on-a-chip compute server aimed at improving speed and more efficiently serving Facebook traffic. The centre will be cooled by outdoor air instead of air conditioning (apparently that can work, even in Texas) and be powered by a 200MW wind energy plant just 145km down the road.