Facebook Inc. (NASDAQ:FB) is planning on expanding its Altoona campus in Iowa by announcing that it has applied for planning permission to construct a second local data center named “Altoona 2”. Facebook’s Altoona campus is the home to a local data center that is nearing the end of construction. The data center when operational will become part of Facebook’s other data centers in Prineville Oregon, Forest City, N.C. and Lulea Sweden. The blueprints and plans for the second local data center are set to be reviewed today by the City of Altoona Planning and Zoning Board.
If the plans are approved by the board, they will move forward to the Altoona City Council’s agenda for the meeting set for May 5. Facebook has not yet announced when it is planning on initializing the construction of the new building should the plans be approved. The expectation is, however, that it will be fairly soon after approval is received. The plans show that the new Altoona building will be approximately the same amount of square feet and have a similar layout to the original Altoona building.
So far, Facebook has invested a total of $299.5 million in the construction of the first 476,000 square foot Altoona building. The reason it chose Altoona as the location, for this major Greenfield investment, was due to the areas vast abundance of wind generated power. There is also a large pool of local talent that has helped with the construction and will be employed to operate the local data center, when the construction is complete. To date, the construction of the first building has required 460 people and taken more than 435,000 hours.
