Facebook: $1 Million A Month in Power Costs

We’ve been writing about rising data center power bills for several years now. But few companies are experiencing this issue more acutely than Facebook, which is reportedly spending “well over $1 million a month” on electricity. That figure comes via TechCrunch, which says spending on power and data center hardware has burned through most of the money Facebook has raised, prompting the company to return to the markets to seek more capital.

The problem, apparently, is the huge amount of user-generated content at Facebook (like those 10 billion photos users have uploaded). TechCrunch says this enormous volume of UGC has driven the company to buy a new NetApp 3070 storage system every week. The company says it has “more than 10,000 servers” but it’s been saying that since the spring and the number would likely be higher than that by now.  Facebook has also been expanding its data center footprint,  leasing substantial chunks of new space in Ashburn, Virginia and Santa Clara, California.

Facebook is clearly a hot property, and as such has been the focus of many rumors, a few of which have turned out to be true. But we have no problem believing that their  power bills are huge, and growing by the month.