After working with the team to locate the Facebook Datacenter on a plot of my client’s land in Prineville, Oregon, they were kind enough to invite to me to the grand opening this last Spring. It was a great party with Mark Zuckerberg as the suprise guest of honor (for those that stayed at the party late enough for the surprise). However, one thing that the grand opening was noticeably missing was an actual tour of the facility.
My name tag from the Facebook Datacenter Grand Opening
You see, for whatever reason, the party was held in tents right outside the Prineville facility. There was a nice hosting station, plenty of heaters, good food, and a large illuminated “like” button at the entrance. But after working with the team to get the right amount of electricity, water, and land for what was going to be the most energy-efficient datacenter of its kind in the world, I kinda wanted to see what it was wall about.
Well, you can imagine my delight when I ran across this recent blog article with a Photo Tour of the Prineville Datacenter…and I must say it is even cooler than I imagined it. The post is from Robert Scoble‘s website and popular blog, Scobleizer. As reported, it is an enormous wind-tunnel with evaporative cooling. This was the plan from the start, but somehow, seeing these pictures, the real scale of it is dumbfounding. The gentleman giving the tour is Thomas (Tom) Furlong. Tom was always in the team that we met with during the Facebook scouting trips (or Vitesse as they were codenamed at the time.)
I find it interesting that Scoble was up here touring the Facebook Datacenter so recently. He works closely with Rackspace on their new Building43 project. Rackspace is one of the companies rumored to be looking for Prineville land for sale.
For those of you who are following up on rumors of our continued activity in the Prineville datacenter world, yes, we are in contract to bring the next large datacenter to the Prineville area. Stay tuned here and we will certainly post information when we are allowed to release it.