Facebook to Build Data Centre in Croatia?

Croatia is to build a 30,000 square-metre data centre for Facebook to store such data as users photos and videos, reports business daily Poslovni dnevnik.

When complete, the data centre will be among the three biggest in Europe, and will be the only data centre outside the US that Facebook will own. Currently the social network runs out of data centres in the US, as well as a leased centre in Sweden. With over 1 billion active users, Facebook has continued to extend its extensive infrastructure to support rapid growth.

Facebook’s powerful data centres are home to thousands of computer servers, which are networked together and linked to the outside world through fiber optic cables.

Luka Gašpar, Director of Croatian firm Emerson, who specialise in manufacturing modular data centers, confirmed that they currently working for Facebook. Emerson make green-friendly ‘containers equipped with power and cooling facilities’ which are assembled in a similar fashion as lego.

“Croatia is a world leader in the technology of modular data centers, and Emerson is the largest such player in the world and we currently work everywhere,” said Gašpar.

Emerson’s local production plant is located near Zabok in the north-west of Croatia.

Facebook’s new center in Croatia will be a key place to store data from over 800 million users from Europe, the Middle East and Africa.