It takes a lot of space to house information related to 350 million people. For this reason, Facebook is preparing to build its own data center in Prineville, in the state of Oregon (USA).
When Facebook began operating, all the information related to its first users, students at Harvard University, fit on one server. A few years and 350 million users later, it is clear that the management of personal data has become a task as enormous as it is a priority for the most popular social network in the world.
For this reason, Facebook will build its own data center in Prineville, in the state of Oregon (USA), according to Jonathan Heiliger, Facebook's vice president of technology. Heiliger explains that Facebook manages such an amount of information from its users that it is more profitable for it to build its own data center than to continue leasing servers, as it has been doing since its inception.
The first stone has already been laid for a work that will take twelve months to complete and will cost 180 million dollars. The building will house 35 permanent workers and dozens of part-time employees.
Of course, a page dedicated to its data center has already been created on Facebook, where you can follow all the news related to its construction.
Thus, Facebook will have Google and Amazon as neighbors, sites that have also established their data centers in Oregon. Why there? The state offers them cheap energy, a good climate and tax incentives. For Facebook, the construction of the center was an essential step, because as users increase considerably, so do the zeros on invoices.
However, the note has been given by environmentalists. Although the social network lists its efforts to minimize the environmental impact of its operation (such as natural cooling or the reuse of heat from servers as office heating in the cold months), there is already a protest about the energy source of the data center. While Google or Microsoft use electricity from a hydroelectric plant, Facebook's building will use energy from a coal-fired thermal plant in Idaho.