Founded in 2004, Facebook’s mission is to give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together. Over 2 billion people use Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, or Messenger every month to stay connected with friends and family, to discover what’s going on in the world, and to share and express what matters to them. Facebook is defined by our unique culture – one that rewards impact. We encourage people to be bold and solve the problems they care most about. We work in small teams and move fast to develop new products, constantly iterating. The phrase “this journey is 1% finished” reminds us that we’ve only begun to fulfill our mission. As we evolve our journey to bring the world closer together, we stay true to the same core values to guide the way we work and the decisions we make every step of the way: be open, be bold, move fast, focus on impact, and build social value.

Data centers are part of the infrastructure that helps us bring WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook and more to people around the globe. They support Facebook’s mission to give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together.

When we first envisioned our Prineville data center, the first data center we built, we knew we wanted it to be one of the most energy efficient and environmentally friendly in the world. To achieve these goals, we redesigned our entire physical infrastructure, from grid to gates, with a focus on squeezing out every possible efficiency. The end result: a data center that requires 52% less energy to operate than a comparable facility built to code requirements and is LEED® Gold Certified.

The Prineville data center is one of the most energy efficient facilities of its kind in the world. Energy use in the data centers is measured in terms of power usage effectiveness (“PUE”), which is determined by dividing the amount of power entering a data center by the power used to run the computers in it.

According to Wired, which featured Facebook’s Prineville data center in its December 2011 story, “2011: The Year Data Centers Turned Green”, most data centers have a PUE of 2.0 to 3.0. The United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) gold standard for data center PUE is 1.5. This means that for every 1.5 watts that go through the utility meter, one watt is delivered to the computer infrastructure.