When you think of Facebook, you don’t necessarily think they they’re doing much damage to the environment. We think of Facebook as being an online social media network. We think of it as bringing friends from far away together and bringing interests together. What we never really think of is how all this is done. We never think of how Facebook is storing all the pictures we load up onto our pages and what it takes to manage the amount of data that’s out there.
Running this data centers that stores the billions of pictures that’s on Facebook takes a lot of energy. Up until recently, fossil fuel was the fuel of choice to power these data centers. We recently had the privilege to visit Facebook’s new data center in Luleå, Sweden. This new data center is built to be green. It harvests energy from the near by river and uses the natural cool air of the region to cool down all the servers. This cuts down on the fossile fuel that is used to store all the Facebook data.
The data center isn’t complete yet but we got the first look. Here are some pictures we took. It’s been raining for a few days in Luleå so everything’s super muddy. Good thing they gave us some protective gear for our trek through the mud and construction site.
Here is where Facebook plan on storing all the servers. The shafts on the ceiling allows for the hot air to be filtered out of the room.
And here is our awesome professor having the time of his life.
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