Facebook builds new server

Social networking giant Facebook has built a computer server that is 38% more energy efficient and 24% more cost-effective than the machines it was previously using, and claims it would share its design with others, reports The Wall Street Journal Online.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg says he hopes that introducing the Open Compute Project and sharing the design would encourage industry-wide collaboration around best practices for data centre and server technology.

Facebook's move comes as technology titans like Apple, Google and Twitter are scrambling to build vast data centres so they can provide computing resources, data storage capacity and software services to companies and consumers over the Internet.

The US federal government, through the Department of Energy, has shown interest in adopting Facebook's technology, according to Mercury News.com.

Zynga, AMD, Dell, HP and Intel worked with Facebook to develop the technology.

According to the US Environmental Protection Agency, data centres use about 1.5% of total US electricity consumption at a cost of $4.5 billion annually. The amount is expected to nearly double in the next five years.