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Facebook Plans Mega Data Center in NC

NCStoring the minute, up-to-date details of 600 million lives takes a lot of memory and a lot of power. According to Facebook, users add 100 million new photos every day and share more than 30 billion pieces of content on Facebook each month. Factor in its continued breakneck growth rate, and the world's largest social network needs more data storage, and soon.

That's why it's investing $450 million in a new data center near Forest City in Rutherford County, western North Carolina, to be built over an 18-month period beginning sometime next year. It will complement data storage at a similar facility now nearing completion in Prineville, Oregon, as well as nine other data centers already leased by the company in Silicon Valley and Ashburn, Virginia.

With its latest move, Facebook joins Google and Apple, which built data centers in western North Carolina after being wooed by cheap land and tax incentives from friendly state and county governments.

Of course, all this building also serves as a boon to local economies. North Carolina Gov. Bev Perdue made the inevitable joke: "We are proud that Facebook chose to make North Carolina a 'friend.' The feeling is certainly mutual... The investment and jobs at the data center will be a boon to that region of the state, and will help confirm North Carolina's distinction as a global business destination." The North Carolina facility should create over 250 construction jobs and employ 35-45 full-time staff once complete.

The sheer size of the new Facebook facilities provides a good measure of social media's impact on the world at large: the Forest City facility will measure 300,000 square feet on a 150-acre site, while the Prineville center will measure 307,000 square feet after a second phase is complete. Together that's about the size of the 650,000-square-foot Jacob K. Javits convention center in New York City -- and it's all devoted to storing, sorting, and analyzing user data.

Both centers were constructed according to the latest eco-friendly green design principles, including reusing waste heat from servers to heat office space, evaporative cooling, and software that reduces demand for servers by 50%, but they will inevitably consume quite a bit of power. Facebook's current power consumption ranges between 2.25 megawatts and 6 megawatts per day, according to the company; after the new data centers are complete, that will probably increase to about 36 megawatts -- enough electricity for about 36,000 homes. On the other hand, that's a small fraction of the 11,000 megawatts consumed by New York City during peak summer months, and it's also a relatively small part of the 5,000 megawatts consumed by all data centers in the U.S. in 2008, at a cost of $18.5 billion -- enough to power five million homes, the same amount consumed by the state of Mississippi.

Overall the number of servers operating in the U.S. increased from 2.6 million in 1997 to 5.6 million in 2003, 11.8 million in 2007, and 17 million in 2009. Google alone is prepared to expand to as many as 10 million servers in the not-too-distant future, the company revealed in 2009.

Facebook's new center in North Carolina will run on electricity from Duke Energy, which currently generates about 54.5% of its power from coal, 27% from nuclear, 12% from wind and hydro, and 6.5% from natural gas. However, Duke Energy said it expects to add more renewable energy to its portfolio with increased use of wind power. Facebook's Prineville data center came under fire from Greenpeace, which said the local Oregon utility company uses coal to generate most of its electricity.

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