Facebook is building a data center near Des Moines, Iowa, to bolster its computing power as it rolls out new services and as the growing use of smartphones increase the pressure on its infrastructure. Behind the scenes, Facebook is a global service of immense scale and complexity -- over 1 billion people use Facebook every month, and every day there are more than 2.7 billion Likes and over 2.4 billion content items shared with friends. As Facebook's services continues to grow, its technical infrastructure also continues to scale. In order to deliever fast, reliable experience on Facebook every day, the company has to invest in new data centers.



Altoona will be Facebook's fourth owned and operated data center, and its third in the United States. The others are in Prineville, Oregon; Forest City, North Carolina; and Lulea, Sweden. The facility will feature the same Open Compute Project server designs and outdoor-air cooling system that the other facillities do, but it will also incorporate improvements to the building design, networking architecture, and more.

Facebook plans to break ground this summer and expects to begin serving user traffic in 2014.