Forest City, N.C., was once known as Burnt Chimney. But smokestacks are definitely a thing of the past, thanks to the social media giant Facebook, which is investing another $200 million to expand its data center campus there with a third, 480,000-sf building.
Construction reportedly is underway in Forest City, which lies between Asheville, N.C., and Greenville, S.C.
In a blog he posted on Facebook, Keven McCammon, the data center’s site manager, said that construction would add to a project that already has created “thousands of jobs in the regional economy and millions of dollars in economic impact.”
There’s no question that Facebook’s presence has been a boon to Forest City and its 7,400 local residents. The company invested $450 million into the first two buildings that each span 300,000 sf. RTI International, a firm Facebook retained to measure its economic impact, found that between 2011 and 2013 the data center had generated a total gross economic impact of $707 million and supported 5,000 jobs in North Carolina.
And since 2011, Facebook has awarded an estimated $575,000 to schools and qualified nonprofits in Rutherford County, where Forest City is located. Facebook recently agreed to support a pilot program to provide free WiFi access to 75 to 100 students in the local school district.
Office space at Facebook's data center in Forest City.
Facebook, along with other tech companies, has favored North Carolina for its data center because of the state’s low-cost, reliable and available power, relatively inexpensive land, available water (at Forest City, Facebook is deploying evaporative cooling, which requires mist spray to cool the air as it enters the facility), proximity to East Coast customers, and generous tax incentives.
In June, Facebook announced plans to build a third data center on its campus in Altoona, Iowa, where its first data center there was already operational and a second was under construction. One month later, it broke ground on construction of a data center in Fort Worth, Texas, for which the company will invest $500 million in three 250,000-sf buildings. That data center, when it opens next year, will be powered entirely by wind power.
Facebook was the recipient of a $146.7 million incentive package from Fort Worth to locate its data center there. The Associated Press reports that state governments across the country over the past decade have extended nearly $1.5 billion in tax incentives to hundreds of data center projects initiated by various tech companies.
Facebook also has data centers in Pineville, Ore., and Lulea, Sweden.
Related Stories
| Dec 9, 2013
Does technology help or hinder innovation?
Whether digital technology will help or hinder workplace insights remains a topic of ongoing debate. FastCo.Design features insights from business scholars on both sides of the issue.
| Dec 5, 2013
Translating design intent from across the globe
I recently attended the Bentley User Conference in Vejle, Denmark. I attended the event primarily to get a sense for the challenges our Danish counterparts are experiencing in project delivery and digital communication. One story I heard was from a BIM manager with Henning Larsen Architects in Denmark, who told me about a project she’d recently completed overseas in the Middle East. She outlined two distinct challenges and offered some interesting solutions to those challenges.
| Dec 3, 2013
‘BIM for all’ platform pays off for contractor
Construction giant JE Dunn is saving millions in cost avoidances by implementing a custom, cloud-based BIM/VDC collaboration platform.
| Nov 27, 2013
Exclusive survey: Revenues increased at nearly half of AEC firms in 2013
Forty-six percent of the respondents to an exclusive BD+C survey of AEC professionals reported that revenues had increased this year compared to 2012, with another 24.2% saying cash flow had stayed the same.
| Nov 25, 2013
Electronic plan review: Coming soon to a city near you?
With all the effort AEC professionals put into leveraging technology to communicate digitally on projects, it is a shame that there is often one major road block that becomes the paper in their otherwise “paperless” project: the local city planning and permitting department.
| Nov 22, 2013
Kieran Timberlake, PE International develop BIM tool for green building life cycle assessment
Kieran Timberlake and PE International have developed Tally, an analysis tool to help BIM users keep better score of their projects’ complete environmental footprints.
| Nov 8, 2013
Can Big Data help building owners slash op-ex budgets?
Real estate services giant Jones Lang LaSalle set out to answer these questions when it partnered with Pacific Controls to develop IntelliCommand, a 24/7 real-time remote monitoring and control service for its commercial real estate owner clients.
| Oct 30, 2013
Why are companies forcing people back to the office?
For a while now companies have been advised that flexibility is a key component to a successful workplace strategy, with remote working being a big consideration. But some argue that we’ve moved the needle too far toward a “work anywhere” culture.
| Oct 30, 2013
11 hot BIM/VDC topics for 2013
If you like to geek out on building information modeling and virtual design and construction, you should enjoy this overview of the top BIM/VDC topics.
| Oct 18, 2013
Meet the winners of BD+C's $5,000 Vision U40 Competition
Fifteen teams competed last week in the first annual Vision U40 Competition at BD+C's Under 40 Leadership Summit in San Francisco. Here are the five winning teams, including the $3,000 grand prize honorees.
