Facebook to build new $300 million data center in Iowa

Facebook plans to open its fourth data center in 2014, to keep up with increasing demands

Facebook has over a billion monthy users, and it is only continuing to grow. With more people using the service comes more data to process, and Facebook needs to make sure that can it keep up with the speed that its users have come to enjoy. 

That is why the social network has decided to add a new data center, which will be located in Altoona, Iowa, it was announced Tuesday.

The data center will be 476,000-square foot building, which will be built on a 194 acre site. The site is big enough that it has the possibility of being able to accommodate as many as two more data center buildings, which Facebook could potentially choose to build in the future. Facebook plans to break ground this summer and expects to begin serving user traffic by next year. 

This will be Facebook's fourth data center; it joins Facebook's existing centers in Prineville, Oregon; Forest City, North Carolina; and Luleå, Sweden. And, like those other facilities, the new data center will feature the same Open Compute Project server designs and outdoor-air cooling system. But the facility will also "incorporate evolutionary improvements" to design of the building, as well as "networking architecture," Jay Parikh, Vice President of Infrastructure Engineering at Facebook, wrote in a blogpost Tuesday.

"When complete, Altoona will be among the most advanced and energy efficient facilities of its kind."

Facebook picked Iowa, Parikh said, because of its "abundance of wind-generated power" and the fact that it is "home to a great talent pool that will help build and operate the facility."

“Today’s announcement further solidifies Iowa’s position as a destination for tech companies – from major data center operations like Facebook’s to the innovative start-ups we continue to see popping up around our state,” Iowa Governor Terry Branstad said in a statement. “Our productive workforce and our overall cost of doing business help us to win great projects like this.”

There is another reason Facebook chose the location: it was given $18 million in tax benefits from the Iowa Economic Development Authority (IEDA) board, as long as the company invests at least $299.5 million in the project, and that it creates 31 new jobs at the minimum. The company was also given unspecified incentives from the city of Altoona as well.

Ultimately, Facebook is building this new data center to keep up with the demands of the large amount of traffic coming in from its one billion users.

"Behind the scenes, Facebook is a global service of immense scale and complexity -- over 1 billion people use Facebook every month, and every day there are more than 2.7 billion Likes and over 2.4 billion content items shared with friends," wrote Parikh.

"In the coming years, as our service continues to grow and people share and connect in more ways, we need to make sure that our technical infrastructure also continues to scale. Our goal is not just to deliver you a fast, reliable experience on Facebook every day – we also want to help make connectivity a universal opportunity. Our data centers are essential for making that happen."

(Image source: https://newsroom.fb.com)