Facebook To Open $300m Iowa Data Centre

Facebook is to invest $299.5 million (£196m) in the first phase of an efficient data centre on a site in Iowa where a new facility has been rumoured for some time.

The data centre at Altoona, Iowa, will make use of Iowa’s extensive wind-powered electricity, and was announced on a blog post by Jay Parikh, Facebook’s vice president of infrastructure engineering. It will use Facebook’s own implementation of the Open Compute design of stripped down, low-energy servers.

Wind of change?

“We’re excited to have found a new home in Iowa, which has an abundance of wind-generated power and is home to a great talent pool that will help build and operate the facility,” said Parikh. “We plan to break ground this summer and expect to begin serving user traffic in 2014.”

Like other cloud-based companies, Facebook has been fighting back against campaigns by environmentalist Greenpeace, which point out that the giant data centres which run their services use “dirty” electricity from fossil fuels.

Apple has sworn off fossil-powered energy, with plans to generate its own solar power and use only renewable electricity, while Google is using its muscle to help pressure utilities like Duke energy in North Carolina to build new renewable generation capacity supported by new green tariffs.

Facebook’s moves have been more about using electricity efficiently, without paying much attention to the source of it. Facebook owns three data centres in the US, and one in Lulea, Sweden, all of which are run with efficiency measures such as the use of outside air to cool the servers, instead of energy-hungry air-conditioning units.

Greenpeace’s response, therefore was somewhat lukewarm, urging Facebook to do more to change the behaviour of utility providers: “In Iowa, Facebook has chosen a location where it has great potential to power its newest data center with the wind energy that is booming there, but to do so it must show a willingness to work with Iowa’s major utility, MidAmerican Energy, to provide more clean energy to the grid,” said a statement from  Greenpeace International IT analyst Gary Cook.

“MidAmerican is still powering its grid with a mix of mostly dirty energy sources like coal and gas. We expect Facebook to meet the ambition it has expressed in its renewable energy goals by following the example Google has set in Oklahoma and North Carolina and demanding that MidAmerican provide significant new renewable energy to Iowa’s grid to meet the expected large electricity demand of Facebook’s data center.”

Last week, the social giant began publishing real-time data centre efficiency information, including the PUE (power usage effectiveness) which measures how much electricity is burnt by the data centre in tasks such as cooling, instead of reaching the  IT equipment it houses.

The new data centre is just the first phase of building on the site as rumours, usually referred to as “Operation Slingshot”, have suggested it could ultimately be the location of a $1.5 billion data centre.

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