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In fact, Facebook have offices and facilities all over the world, and
they're making some major inroads in tech development. In order to
reflect this, Mark Zuckerberg has started sharing images of Facebook's
various projects on his personal page, staring with the gigantic data
centre they have nestled away in the Swedish coastal city of Luleå.
As it turns out, a huge, Facebook-run data centre looks like the set for
a dystopic sci-fi film. Long corridors full of monolithic server units,
cooling fans, stoic-looking people carrying armfuls of technology
that's probably worth more than their houses, the works. The photos have
obviously been staged to give off this vibe, but even still, the
sterility is striking.
The reason Facebook even have such a facility within about 70 miles of
the Arctic Circle is, perhaps unsurprisingly, because of the cold. The
big fans pull the cold air into the building to keep the server units at
an optimal operating temperature, and the coastal location means that
the whole place can be powered hydroelectrically, making it far more
energy efficient than other, similar data centers.
Perhaps the most interesting photo in this share, however, doesn't show
the facility at all, but an early conceptual sketch of it, drawn on a
napkin by Director of Datacenter Engineering Jay Park. Facebook's
offices might be bright, and full of bean bag chairs and VR headsets,
but it's in cold, Bauhaus structures like this that the real innovation
is being done.
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