The facility will create more than 250 jobs during its 18-month building phase. When completed, the data center will employ around 35-45 full-time and contract workers. Facebook is expected to invest about $450 million dollars in the new data center.
Additional construction phases may be possible in the future, depending on business needs.
“We are proud that Facebook chose to make North Carolina a ‘friend.’ The feeling is certainly mutual,” said Gov. Perdue. “You can’t pick up a newspaper, read a magazine or flip on the television without hearing more great news about our state. The investment and jobs at the data center will be a boon to that region of the state, and will help confirm North Carolina’s distinction as a global business destination.”
This deal has been in the works for a while. North Carolina has been working with Facebook’s representatives for about a year to help bring together the land, utilities and incentives to make the project a success. This data center adds to the list of large scale data center’s North Carolina has become known for. Those include data center projects with Apple, Google and IBM.
The building will be designed to LEED gold standards. In addition, Facebook will bring in innovative cooling and power management technologies to make the facility one of the most energy efficient data centers in the United States. Facebook has become a pioneer in efficient software and facility use. That allows the company rely on less than half the computing power (and related energy consumption) that a similar data center would have required only a few years ago.