Facebook has been opening advanced data centers across the U.S. quite for some time now, so it should come as no surprise that the company has just announced plans to build a new one in Fort Worth, Texas. What is surprising, however, is that this new center will be drastically more eco-friendly than its predecessors. The Fort Worth facility will run almost entirely on wind energy.
“We expect Fort Worth to be one of the most advanced, efficient, and sustainable data centers in the world,” Facebook representatives said in a news release. “Our continuing work on data center design is an important part of our overall infrastructure efficiency efforts, which have helped us save more than $2 billion in infrastructure costs over the last three years.”
Facebook has already erected energy-efficient data centers in Altoona, IA, Prineville, OR, Forest City, NC and even one in Sweden — but the Texas center will be the one responsible for handling the Facebook apps and services you deal with on day-to-day basis, and will also help connect billions of people to the Internet through Internet.org.
Furthermore, Facebook is sharing its data center designs with the public via the Open Compute Project, which consists of 200 members and thousands of participants who can all have a hand in developing future sustainable data centers.
It’s worth mentioning, however, that Facebook is not the first company to build sustainable data centers. Earlier this year, Apple purchased over $800 million in solar panels to power some of its data centers and other buildings, and let’s not forget that Google and Microsoft also have their fair share of renewable data centers speckled across the country.
This isn’t exactly a new trend, but it’s definitely one that we’d like to see continue. If big companies can save money and save the planet at the same time, everybody wins.
