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.
Facebook announced recently that "construction is going on and consists of three 250,000-sq ft buildings across the 111-acre site".
"When the Fort Worth data centre comes online in late 2016, it will be 100 per cent powered by 200 megawatts of wind energy and cooled using outdoor air instead of air conditioners," it said.
The Forth Worth data centre will be Facebook's fifth data centre (and fourth in the US), joining facilities in Iowa, Oregon, North Carolina and Sweden.
The social network also said it plans on creating at least 40 jobs in Fort Worth to help boost the local economy.
Tom Furlong, Facebook's vice president of infrastructure, wrote in a blog post that as part of the deal, 200 megawatts of new wind energy was brought to Texas.
Ken Patchett, Facebook's director of data centre operations, wrote in a post that the data centre would help improve the social network's growing global infrastructure, which supports Facebook on desktop and mobile, as well as Internet.org, the Facebook-backed service that aims to bring free Internet to people in emerging markets.
The Fort Worth data centre should play a major role then in shoring global ambitions of the social networking site that has 1.5 million users — over half the number of global Internet users — and continues to grow, analysts believe.
According to DOE statistics, data centre electricity use doubled between 2001 to 2006, from 30 to 60 billion kilowatt- hours of electricity, and stood at about 100 billion kilowatt- hours of electricity as of 2013.
This amounts to about 2 per cent of all US electricity use and climbing.
