Facebook’s Explosive Groundbreaking

When Facebook broke ground on its new data center in Prineville, Oregon last Thursday, they did so with the traditional props associated with such photo opportunities – hard hats and shovels bearing the “Facebook” logo. Donning the hard hats, local officials grabbed shovels and each moved a spadeful of loose earth a few feet. But the real fun came later, when the project team used 6,000 pounds of explosives to move a much larger volume of dirt. Facebook director of site operations Tom Furlong got to flip the switch. Here’s the video from the Facebook engineering team.

For more coverage of the Prineville project, see Facebook to Build Its Own Data Centers and It’s Official: Facebook is Oregon’s ‘Company X’. For additional video, check out our DCK video archive and the Data Center Videos channel on YouTube.

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About Rich Miller

Rich Miller is the founder and editor-in-chief of Data Center Knowledge, and has been reporting on the data center sector since 2000. He has tracked the growing impact of high-density computing on the power and cooling of data centers, and the resulting push for improved energy efficiency in these facilities.