Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB) has announced today that it will be constructing a new facility to be used as its data center in a small village called Clonee located in Ireland.
The Facility which is going to be built on a 227-accree site will rely specifically on wind power. “The facility which has been estimated to be completed by late 2017 or early 2018 will be handling web traffic and the computing needs of Facebook,” says Tom Furlong Facebook vice president. According to Local Meath Count Council, the site will be a big deal for locals. Clonee and a neighboring village called Dunboyne are 10 miles away from Dublin City and are inhabited by 10,000 or fewer people
This facility is going to be Facebook’s sixth data center. Around July last year, Facebook also confirmed that it will be building a data centre in Forth Worth, Texas. Some other sites that Facebook presently has its facilities on are Altoona, Iowa; Forest City, North Carolina; Lulea, Sweden; and it original site in Prineville, Oregon.
In a blog post made by Furlong, a price tag about the new facility to be built in Ireland was not mentioned, but according to local filings, the Forth Worth site will cost Facebook around $1 billion USD. Alternatively, these data centers are known to be capital intensive projects. This is to say, Facebook has decided to build data centers to runs its own apps separately, unlike many modern web apps such as Airhub and Snapchat that run on cloud infrastructures. This will maximize the efficiency of Facebook web applications.
Just like every other data center owned by Facebook, the new one to be built in Clonee will contain storage, servers and working gears that will be designed by Facebook engineers. Some of the properties mentioned are the slick Yosemite servers, which is now part of the Open Compute Project written by Furlong. He also added that there will also be a fast 100GB Ethernet connections.
The choice of the site is very interesting, it was rumoured sometime in 2013, that Facebook will build a data in Asia, precisely at a site in Taiwan. But today have changed all that, Facebook has decided to expand its presence in Europe through Ireland where its international headquarters is presently located.
This can be brought down to the singular fact that if we take a look at the Facebook financial record, we see that in the year 2014, Facebook generated $3.13 billion USD in revenue, whereas in Asia pacific just $1.74 billion was realized. These figures are according to the company’s annual report of 2014.
