Facebook joins the big leagues with first data center in Oregon

Facebook is finally getting its own data center, with a facility opening up in Prineville, Oregon today. For years, the company has been leasing space shared with other businesses. There’s a high premium to lease server space, but that helped Facebook avoid the high up-front cost of setting up their own facilities when they were smaller. But now that the social network has broken 350 million active users, it’s become more economical to operate their own data centers, joining the leagues of Google, Yahoo and Microsoft.

The company says it’s keeping environmental considerations in mind by using an evaporative cooling system to water incoming air, re-using server heat to warm the office space and a more efficient kind of power supply that cuts electricity usage by 12 percent.