Facebook just took the wraps off its fifth data center, with this one landing in Fort Worth, Texas. Like most things at Facebook, the center already has its own Facebook Page.
The Fort Worth location joins the four existing centers in Oregon, Iowa, North Carolina, and Sweden. Like its immediate predecessor in Iowa, the data center will be powered by 100 percent renewable energy. To make this happen, Facebook announced it is helping bring 200 megawatts of new wind energy to the Texas grid by way of a 17,000 acre site about 90 miles from the data center.
Facebook is well known for optimizing its data centers to be highly efficient.
For example, the company’s new designs ditch the cluster of machines commonly seen in data centers, instead replacing them with single server pods all connected to one high-performance network. Like the Oregon location, the center will be cooled using outdoor air, which greatly reduces electricity costs.
Facebook said that this overall infrastructure efficiency will have now helped save the company more than $2 billion in infrastructure costs over the last three years.
Like previous Facebook data centers, designs for the Fort Worth location will be open-sourced through the Open Compute Project.