Facebook plans another data center

Facebook has plans to build a $1 billion data center in Henrico County, Va.

Approximately $750 million will be used to construct the 970,000-square-foot data center and the remaining $250 million will be used for solar facilities to power the center.

The United States installed almost 2.4 gigawatts of solar photovoltaics in the second quarter of 2017, according to the U.S. Solar Market Insight report from GTM Research and the Solar Energy Industries Association. The report, which was released in September, said this represented an increase of 8 percent year-on-year.

Investments in the data center category in the first half of 2017 were double that of the entire year prior at $18.2 billion, according to CBRE. At this pace, investment in the data center sector — which includes all single-asset, portfolio, and entity-level/mergers and acquisition transactions — is on track to surpass the total for the three previous years combined.

The project comes after the social media giant announced plans to build a data center in Ohio. The firm will invest $750 million to build a new facility in New Albany, located near Columbus.

Facebook’s existing U.S. data centers are in Oregon, North Carolina and Iowa. Centers in Fort Worth, Texas, and Los Lunas, New Mexico, are currently under construction. In addition, Facebook announced plans for another new site in Papillon, Neb., in April.

The seven major U.S. data center markets — Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas/Fort Worth, the New York tri-state region, northern Virginia, Phoenix, and Silicon Valley — combined saw nearly 88 megawatts of occupancy gains in the first half of 2017.

Other data center projects in Virginia include a development plan for a data center at White Oak. It would be built in phases, with the first being a 1 million-square-foot data center on a 328-acre site on the northeastern and northwestern corners of the intersection of Technology Boulevard and Portugee Road, the Richmond Times-Dispatch reported in mid-September.

And another operator, Peak 10, submitted plans to build a 72,500-square-foot data center located off Villa Park Drive in northern Henrico.