Facebook constructs data centre

Social networking giant Facebook has begun construction on its own 147,000-square-foot data centre, estimated to cost about $US188.2 million.

The building is scheduled for completion in 2011, and will be built in Oregon. Vice president of tech operations Jonathon Heiliger said in a company blog post “we are now ready to build our own [centre]”.

“When Facebook first began with a small group of people using it and no photos or videos to display, the entire service could run on a single server.”

“However, as the site expanded to different colleges around the US, we needed to add more servers and data centre capacity to keep up with the increasing number of people who were joining every day.”

It is suspected Facebook chose the data centre’s location in Oregon due to a large tax break. The company has allegedly agreed to maintain a 35-employee average during the facility’s 15-year operation period.