Facebook to open its first datacentre

An artist's impression of the planned Facebook datacentre in Oregon

Facebook is to open its first datacentre after years of renting server capacity from other companies. The social networking site now has 350 million users, and having its own facility will be much more cost efficient.

The new datacentre will be located in Prineville, Oregon, and will use energy efficient technology such as evaporative cooling and a system that reuses server heat.

"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," said Facebook technical operations vice president Jonathan Heiliger in the company blog.

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

The new facility will add more computing and storage capacity, which Facebook believes will deliver a faster and more reliable experience. The site currently has to cope with users uploading 40 million new photos every day.

"This is just one step along the way in building a business for the long term, and dedicating resources to scale our site to support our users, developers and advertisers," said Heiliger.

Facebook has produced a short video about its datacentre plans.