Here’s What You Need To Know About Facebook’s Coming 110 Acre Data Centre

Facebook announced that it would be building a new data centre in Fort Worth, Texas that will be powered by renewable energy. The project is expected to be ready late next year and will bring the total number of Facebook data centres to five. The social networking giant currently has three data centres in the US and one in Sweden.

We hear the site is about 110 acres in size and about $500m will eventually be spent to bring it up.

On cooing, the data centre will be cooled using outdoor air instead of regular high energy consuming air conditioners. Facebook is also investing in a 200 Megawatt wind power project “and like its immediate predecessor, Fort Worth will be powered by 100% renewable energy, thanks to the 200 MW of new wind energy we helped bring to the Texas grid as part of this deal. Thanks to our continued focus on efficiency and our investments in renewables in recent years, the carbon impact of one person’s use of Facebook for an entire year is the same as the carbon impact of a medium latte.” said Facebook’s VP of infrastructure Tom Furlong.

There have been calls across the tech world for companies to invest more in renewables and the US which aims to be less dependent on foreign sources of energy has invested a lot in renewable sources of energy since 2009.

Mark Zuckerberg who is the Facebook CEO said in a post that the data centre will be built using hardware designed and developed through the Open Compute Project whic was announced in 2011.

In Africa, Nigeria and South Africa account for nearly 60% of the total number of data centres and this represents an uneven distribution of data centres across the continent.