Facebook ups investment in NM data center to $1B

Dive Brief:

Facebook announced Tuesday that it will triple the size of its Los Lunas, NM, data center and increase its investment there to $1 billion, according to the Albuquerque Journal.
The social media giant had already planned to build two buildings — a $250 million, 510,000-square-foot facility and a 460,00-square-foot building — but will now triple that number to six. Earlier this year, Facebook struck a $45 million deal with the Public Service Company of New Mexico (PNM), which will build three new solar plants to power the data center complex.
In order to persuade Facebook to build its data center in New Mexico, the state sweetened the deal by giving the company a 30-year property tax break worth $30 billion, $10 million in local grants, $3 million for job training funds and as much as $1.6 million a year in gross receipts tax reimbursement. The project will see 1,000 construction workers at the peak of activity and is expected to employ 50 permanent workers per building.

Dive Insight:

Facebook is also investing $1 billion in a new data center in Henrico County, VA, near Richmond, bucking the trend of building out such centers in Northern Virginia. According to CNN, the facility will also use alternative energy with Facebook spending $250 million of its total investment on solar power.

In the paperwork filed for its initial public offering in 2012, Facebook officials wrote that just loading a user's home page — which takes less than one second — requires accessing information from hundreds of servers, according to CIO. Those servers process thousands of pieces of data before being able to deliver the desired piece of information back to the user, the filing notes.

In addition to the Los Lunas complex, Facebook is building new data centers in Fort Worth, TX, and Ireland. The company announced that it was also tripling the size of its Fort Worth facility by adding 1.75 million square feet of space.

Data center construction only stands to grow in the coming years as the need for more infrastructure to support faster, more extensive internet use increases across the country. A recent CBRE report found that investments in the category for the first half of this year were already twice that of 2016 in its entirety at $18.2 billion. If that trend holds, data center investments for 2017 could surpass the past three years' total combined, AZ Big Media noted.