Facebook recently filed a permit for a $267-million-dollar expansion for the next phase of their Fort Worth data center. The California-based social media company is establishing a significant presence in the Fort Worth area. Even though the project will be under construction for the foreseeable future, the facility already had a soft opening planned for May 4. 

When complete, the Facebook campus will include five buildings with 2.5 million square feet of data center space on 150 acres in Fort Worth. Located near state highway 170 in the Alliance Airport area of North Fort Worth, the facility is currently the largest project under development in North Texas.

The permit filed with the city of Fort Worth will add a third building with 400,000 square feet of extra space for the data center. The data center houses tens of thousands of servers that power the website’s activity. Because servers produce a significant amount of heat, the facility uses green technology to cool them, including direct evaporative cooling and outside air.

Via Facebook Newsroom

Right now, 150 Facebook employees and additional contract workers are supporting the newly opened site. Facebook will eventually add more employees, but does not expect to add 150 employees with the opening of each building. The currently operational part of the Facebook facility includes 440,000 square feet of computer server space, as well as 70,000 square feet of administrative space. 

These data center facilities are storage sites for computer servers that provide computing power and memory storage. However, servers have a limited life span. By the time the fifth building is complete, the servers in the first building will have passed their three-year life span and will be ready for replacement. The Facebook facility includes rows of generators to power the servers if they are disrupted.

Ross Perot, Jr., the chairman of Hillwood, the developer of AllianceTexas, was on-site with Fort Worth Mayor Betsy Price and Fort Worth Chamber of Commerce President Bill Thornton to mark the official opening of the data center on May 4.

Facebook also has other data centers in Iowa, North Carolina, and Oregon, with additional plans for another facility in New Mexico.