Mashable: Facebook’s running out of servers to handle its 500+ million users, so it has decided to build a new data center in North Carolina that will cost a whopping $450 million to complete.
The announcement was made by North Carolina Gov. Bev Perdue, who said that the facility will take 18 months to complete and will employ 35 to 45 workers to operate (not including the 250 jobs that will be created during its construction). It is being built in Rutherford County, which is to the west of Charlotte.
Facebook and the governor are also touting the data center’s environmental friendliness and energy efficiency. It will “employ innovative cooling and power management technologies” and utilize Facebook-developed technology that will make the data center “rely on fewer than half the computing power (and related energy consumption) that a similar data center would have required only a few years ago.”
Facebook broke ground on its first data center in January (based in Oregon) to deal with its rapid growth. However, the social network’s growth has been so explosive that it decided in the middle of construction to double the size of the center.
Now it looks like that won’t be enough to support Facebook’s skyrocketing growth, so Facebook is putting down even more money in exchange for the raw computing power necessary to keep the site afloat.