SINGAPORE: Facebook to build billion-dollar data center
Facebook plans to invest more than U.S. $1 billion to create a data center in Singapore, powered by renewable energy and adapted to the city-state’s tropical climate.
The center, to be operational around 2022, will host Facebook servers and centralize its information technology operations, Thomas Furlong, Facebook vice president of infrastructure data centers, said in September 2018.
The 170,000-square-meter site in the land-scarce city-state will be over 11 stories and will come with custom features to cope with the steamy temperatures, which rarely drop below 25 degrees Celsius.
These include a new state-of-the-art cooling system, which uses water rather than air and will work better in the humidity, as well as a building facade made of perforated, lightweight material to allow for better air flow.
The U.S. $1.02 billion, custom-built facility will be Facebook’s 15th data center worldwide. Furlong said Facebook, which had 2.23 billion monthly active users as of the end of June 2018, chose Singapore because of its robust infrastructure, availability of skilled labor and ease of doing business with the government.
Google, which has built two data centers in the city-state, announced in September 2018 it was starting work on a third, bringing it’s investment in the sites to U.S. $850 million. Agence France-Presse
