Google wants to do no evil, but they’re not the only Silicon Valley player committed to moving the needle for good.
According to The New York Times, Facebook’s new data center in Prineville, Oregon will run on specially-designed stripped-down servers that are 38 percent more efficient and 24 percent cheaper than those sold by major server makers.
While Google has remained fairly tight-lipped about its innovations, Facebook said it was starting what it calls the Open Compute Project, making its server designs available to anyone in the industry.
“We are not the only ones who need the kind of hardware that we are building out,” said Mark Zuckerberg, the co-founder and chief executive of Facebook. Mr. Zuckerberg said that by sharing the company’s designs, Facebook would benefit because as more companies adopt those designs, the cost of the custom servers would decline.
Zuckerberg doesn’t say the move is also good for his company’s image, but it is.