December 22, 2017

Facebook adding 1M square feet to Central Oregon data center

Image from Facebook [enlarge]

Facebook announced earlier this month that it will expand its Prineville Data Center in Oregon with two buildings totaling 900,000 square feet that will be connected by another 70,000 square feet of administrative space.

The existing data center consists of three main buildings totaling 1.25 million square feet and a smaller “cold storage” building off Ochoco Highway. Ground was broken on the fourth data storage building this month, and the fifth building will start next year.

A post by K.C. Timmons of Facebook says the fourth building will begin operating in 2020, and the fifth will open in 2021. Timmons wrote that the new buildings will cost “hundreds of millions of dollars.” Facebook already has more than $1 billion invested in the Prineville complex.

Fortis Construction of Portland is building the additions and Sheehan Nagle Hartray Architects of Chicago is the designer. Other team members are Pence Kelly Concrete, Taylor Northwest (mass excavation and site work), TCM (mechanical and plumbing) and Rosendin Electric.

The complex opened in 2011. Buildings were certified LEED gold partly through the use of energy-efficient servers and a low-energy evaporative cooling system that uses the low humidity of Central Oregon's high desert to eliminate traditional air conditioners. The buildings also capture water from roofs to reuse for toilets and interior landscaping.

The complex operates on about half of the energy that a facility built to code would use, and nearly 40 percent less energy than existing facilities that Facebook leases.

More than 200 people work full time at the complex.