Largest data centers in the world: Interesting facts and statistics


For those who want to know more about the numbers and interesting facts regarding the largest data centers in the world, in this article we will try to illustrate and statistically introduce what is behind large IT companies, whose services and products we use daily.

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For those who want to know more about the numbers and interesting facts regarding the largest data centers in the world, in this article we will try to illustrate and statistically introduce what is behind large IT companies, whose services and products we use daily.

Some of the largest IT companies in the world, such as Facebook, Google, Microsoft and many others, invest a lot of money in the safety and security of data. Centers where data is stored and where servers are placed can be measured in hundreds of thousands of square meters. New and more modern buildings are always being built in order to safely and securely store and distribute data.

1. Google Data Center

Google has 16 centers for data processing spread around the world. According to a recent estimate conducted by Microsoft, Google has about 900.000 servers in their centers, and Microsoft is in the lead with 100.000 servers more. In order for Google centers to operate, they use around 260 million watts, accounting for about 0.01% of the total energy in the world. This amount of energy is sufficient to supply 200.000 homes.

2. Facebook Data Center

Facebook, as the leading social network with over one billion users, has its own ’farms’ of servers, designed and built by their own engineers. Since 2011, when they opened their center in Prineville, Oregon, with the dimension of 62000 square meters, Facebook continued to develop and open new centers for data storage all over the world. Last center like that was opened in September this year in a small town of Luleå in the north of Sweden.

Mark Zuckerberg posted on his profile that the latest data center was made in accordance to the latest design infrastructure and safety standards. As a reminder, when Mark started this social network, it operated on a single server located in his dorm room.

Each data storage center has over tens of thousands servers that are networked together via fiber optic cables with the outside world. Every time you share any information on Facebook, servers in these centers receive information and distribute it to to the network of your friends.


Facebook doesn’t share publicly how many servers they use. The latest public number from 2010 was around 60.000, and by today they definitely have over hundreds of thousands.

In their latest report from the end of 2015, Facebook showed that they own network equipment that is worth around 3.63 million billion dollars. When this company is in question, these numbers will certainly continue to increase in the future.

3. Amazon Data Center

In their data centers, Amazon has around 450 000 servers, divided among 7 different locations around the world. Since 2008. this company spent 86 million dollars buying new servers. They store around 40 billion objects on these servers and most of it is cloud-stored data. Web service has around 40 000 servers dedicated to their buyers and gains approximately 17 million monthly visitors who are accessing over 410 terabytes of data. About 30 million Amazon users stream video material that amounts to 40 terabytes per month.

4. Microsoft Data Center

Counting over one billion users and 1 000 000 servers, Microsoft spent around 23 billion dollars on the construction of their data centers for data processing and data storing. Back in 1989. this company built its first data storing center sprawling over 89 000 square meters.

In Redmond, state of Washington, in 2006. they designed and built 500 000 square meter center. They have spent over 15 billion dollars just for developing could-storage service technology. Over 200 online services are distributed using cloud technology everyday.

Few more interesting facts:

  • Some of the bigger data storing centers spend as much energy as a smaller town in USA.
  • Power density of one data center is 100 times larger than that of one big commercial building and is equivalent to 9 shopping malls.
  • With the purpose of maintaining good business flow and as part of planning for unforeseen catastrophes, 8 data-storing centers located around the world, have 7 containers with modular data and each is filled with average amount of over 1000 servers.
  • Data-storing centers emit around 17% carbon dioxide of entire amount produced by global Information and Communication installations.
  • Average life span of a single data center is around 9 years.

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