There seems to be a data center building boom currently going on in Silicon Valley, partly driven by the many hundreds of millions of online social networkers.
Internet map image from The Opte Project
Apparently there are 7 projects underway in Santa Clara alone. If these reports are to be believed, unlike during the over-funded, over-development during the dot-com boom, construction is struggling to meet demand from the likes of fast growing companies such as Facebook.
According to this report, Facebook is looking to grab all the space in two new data centers and a good part of a third that’s still being built. However, it seems Facebook is leasing some space to meet its short term needs until it builds its own in-house.
When Facebook only(!) had 300 million users, it said it had 30,000 servers. User numbers have increased by well over 100 million since then.
It’s good to see that Facebook, Twitter and Yahoo all have servers housed at Digital Realty’s Santa Clara operation. These data centers have a Platinum or Gold rating under the LEED standard for energy efficient buildings.
It’s got to take a hell of a lot of power to run all the servers these companies (and we) are using daily. As well as being efficient, wouldn’t it be great if this power came from clean energy sources at some stage in the near future?
