Social media networking major Facebook will set up a new data center in Fort Worth — powered by renewable energy – for around $1 billion.
According to media reports, Facebook has worked with local energy companies to bring 200-megawatts of renewable wind power to the Texas grid. The wind farm will be located 90 miles from the data center on a 17,000-acre site in Clay County, Texas.
The Fort Worth project will be Facebook’s fifth privately owned data center, and the second using 100 percent renewable energy. The cost of the data center will be nearly $1 billion. Facebook said energy savings for previous centers have saved the social media company $2 billion over the last three years.
The 46,500 sq.m, complex in Fort Worth will employ around 40 people and will cost around $500 million, reports IANS.
“Our data centres power Facebook and will help connect billions of people acorss the globe in the coming years,” Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said. “Fort Worth will be one of the most advanced and energy efficient data centres in the world.”
The hardware used in the complex, to be operational by the end of 2016, will be developed through the Open Commute Project that brings together hundreds of companies including Apple and Microsoft to share data centre designs.
As part of an agreement between Facebook and the Texas government, the company will participate in the construction of a wind park, which will take care of the plant’s electricity needs and also supply around 200 mega watt (MW) to Texas’ grid.
Internet search engine giant Google will be investing more than $2 billion in clean-energy projects, aiming to eventually use only renewable energy sources.
Facebook already has four data centres, one in the Swedish city of Lulea and the other three in the U.S. — Altoona in Iowa, Prineville in Oregon and Forest City in North Carolina.
Earlier, Facebook said its Prineville data center uses 38 percent less energy to do the same work as Facebook’s previous facilities, while costing 24 percent less.
The company in a recent report said Facebook is accessed by 936 million daily active users on average for March 2015. Out of this, 798 million are mobile daily active users on average. The total number of users is 1.44 billion monthly active users. Nearly 82.8 percent of daily active users are outside the US and Canada.
Baburajan K
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