Meta halts data center expansion construction in Denmark

Meta has terminated a contract for the expansion of a major data center in Odense, Denmark. 

Per Aarsleff, the lead contractor for project, valued the cancelled contract at DKK 2.4 billion. As a result, all construction work on the data center will be halted immediately. 

https://www.aarsleff.com/about-aarsleff/news/news/termination-of-contract-for-data-centre-in-odense#

Facebook to build Next Data Center in Odense, Denmark

Thursday, January 19, 2017  365 Data Centers, Denmark, Facebook  

Facebook has selected Odense, Denmark as the location for its next data center, joining Prineville (Oregon), Forest City (North Carolina), Luleå (Sweden), Altoona (Iowa), Fort Worth (Texas), Clonee (Ireland), and Los Lunas (New Mexico) facilities as one of the cornerstones of its global infrastructure. The new data center will be built with Open Compute Project hardware designs and will be one of the most energy efficient to date. The company said...

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Meta reports drop in revenue and profits as CAPEX soars

Meta reported a drop in Q3 revenue and profitability along with rapidly rising capital expediture costs as it invests in infrastructure and metaverse development.

Third Quarter 2022 Operational Highlights

• Family daily active people (DAP) – DAP was 2.93 billion on average for September 2022, an increase of 4% year-over-year.
• Family monthly active people (MAP) – MAP was 3.71 billion as of September 30, 2022, an increase of 4% year-over-year.
• Facebook daily active users (DAUs) – DAUs were 1.98 billion on average for September 2022, an increase of 3% year-over-year.
• Facebook monthly active users (MAUs) – MAUs were 2.96 billion as of September 30, 2022, an increase of 2% year-over-year.
• Ad impressions and price per ad – In the third quarter of 2022, ad impressions delivered across our Family of Apps increased by 17% year-over-year and the average price per ad decreased by 18% year-over-year. 
• Revenue – Revenue was $27.71 billion, a decrease of 4% year-over-year, and an increase of 2% year-over-year on a constant currency basis. Had foreign exchange rates remained constant with the third quarter of 2021, revenue would have been $1.79 billion higher.
• Costs and expenses – Total costs and expenses were $22.05 billion, an increase of 19% year-over-year. This includes an impairment loss of $413 million for certain operating leases as part of ongoing work to align office facilities footprint with our anticipated operating needs. 
• Capital expenditures – Capital expenditures, including principal payments on finance leases, were $9.52 billion for the third quarter of 2022.
• Share repurchases – $6.55 billion of Class A common stock in the third quarter of 2022. As of September 30, 2022, Meta had $17.78 billion available and authorized for repurchases.
• Headcount – Headcount was 87,314 as of September 30, 2022, an increase of 28% year-over-year.

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Meta unveils Grand Teton, its next-gen AI system

At Open Compute Project Summit in San Jose, Meta unveiled Grand Teton, its next-generation, GPU-based hardware platform. Compared to its Zion, its predecessor, Grand Teton boasts 4x the host-to-GPU bandwidth, 2x the compute and data network bandwidth, and 2x the power envelope. Grand Teton also has an integrated chassis in contrast to Zion-EX, which comprises multiple independent subsystems.

Grand Teton has been designed with greater compute capacity to better support memory-bandwidth-bound workloads at Meta, such as its open source DLRMs. Grand Teton’s expanded operational compute power envelope also optimizes it for compute-bound workloads, such as content understanding. 

The previous-generation Zion platform consists of three boxes: a CPU head node, a switch sync system, and a GPU system, and requires external cabling to connect everything. Grand Teton integrates this into a single chassis with fully integrated power, control, compute, and fabric interfaces for better overall performance, signal integrity, and thermal performance. 

This high level of integration dramatically simplifies the deployment of Grand Teton, allowing it to be introduced into data center fleets faster and with fewer potential points of failure, while providing rapid scale with increased reliability.

Meta also introduced Open Rack v3 (ORV3), a data center rack with a frame and power infrastructure capable of supporting a wide range of use cases — including support for Grand Teton.

ORV3’s power shelf isn’t bolted to the busbar. Instead, the power shelf installs anywhere in the rack, which enables flexible rack configurations. Multiple shelves can be installed on a single busbar to support 30kW racks, while 48VDC output will support the higher power transmission needs of future AI accelerators. It also features an improved battery backup unit, upping the capacity to four minutes, compared with the previous model’s 90 seconds, and with a power capacity of 15kW per shelf. Like the power shelf, this backup unit installs anywhere in the rack for customization and provides 30kW when installed as a pair.

https://engineering.fb.com/2022/10/18/open-source/ocp-summit-2022-grand-teton/

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Meta builds out its Sarpy Data Center in Nebraska

Meta is building a new data hall at its Sarpy Data Center campus in Springfield, Nebraska. This will bring the campus to a total of nine buildings and 4 million-square-feet.

The Sarpy Data Center will continue to be supported by 100% renewable energy, made possible through our investments in wind energy, including a wind farm in Dixon County, Neb. Meta reached net zero emissions for its operations in 2020.

The facility was originally called the Papillion data center but was renamed Sarpy Data Center campus in 2021.

https://www.facebook.com/SarpyDataCenter/posts/pfbid02wGy6wFfKbqgXLouRvrLRSgnQNonyv85coDbF1oCeaQ8ouiXC8Ub8ZXS8GFRsvXCSl

Arelion brings 800G capacity to 1623 Farnam data center in Omaha

Wednesday, February 09, 2022  800G, Arelion, Infinera  

Arelion, the newly rebranded Telia Carrier, has upgraded its network capacity and capabilities at 1623 Farnam's interconnected edge data center in Omaha, Nebraska. The network expansion also enables access to Arelion's new multi-terabit optical fiber route, which delivers high-capacity bandwidth from Chicago to Denver and leverages Infinera's ICE6 800G coherent transponder technology. The new route utilizes transponder systems with coherent...

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Meta to expand data center in Gallatin, TN

Meta announced a major expansion of its data center in Gallatin, Tennessee, bringing its total investment in the site to $1 billion.

The expansion will add two new buildings at the Gallatin Data Center campus, which will then reach more than 1.6 million square feet. 

The company has committed to 100% renewable energy. Meta-supported renewable energy projects in Tennessee represent over $111 million in local investment, 700 construction jobs, and 30 annual operational jobs locally.

https://www.facebook.com/GallatinDataCenter/posts/pfbid0EhaCW8qbs4gVyc95XzQBv7Z2g74qKSyv5nk3dX8oEnXfNFJYsNPuf2wDULxCjyRJl

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Meta to expand data center in Huntsville, AL

Meta announced a major expansion of its data center campus in Huntsville, Alabama.

The project will add two buildings to the Meta Huntsville Data Center campus, bringing the facility to nearly 3.5 million square feet. 

This expansion raises Meta's investment in Huntsville to more than $1.5 billion. Once it’s completed, the company anticipates the data center will support more than 300 operational jobs.

Meta has confirmed 100 percent renewable energy. The Meta-contracted project has added 227MWs of new renewable energy in Alabama.

https://www.facebook.com/HuntsvilleDataCenter/posts/pfbid0FDVmPfdrEjvKwtJjgFdKFrvd8VgVWb3etJMfQnp1UDJtfwegcM8MXA69rYiBHrJUl

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Meta selects Azure as strategic cloud provider for AI research

Meta has selected Azure as a strategic cloud provider to help accelerate AI research and development. 

Specifically, Meta will utilize a dedicated Azure cluster of 5400 GPUs using the latest virtual machine (VM) series in Azure (NDm A100 v4 series, featuring NVIDIA A100 Tensor Core 80GB GPUs) for some of their large-scale AI research workloads.

In addition, the companies agreed to collaborate to scale PyTorch adoption on Azure. 

“We are excited to deepen our collaboration with Azure to advance Meta’s AI research, innovation, and open-source efforts in a way that benefits more developers around the world,” Jerome Pesenti, Vice President of AI, Meta. “With Azure’s compute power and 1.6 TB/s of interconnect bandwidth per VM we are able to accelerate our ever-growing training demands to better accommodate larger and more innovative AI models. Additionally, we’re happy to work with Microsoft in extending our experience to their customers using PyTorch in their journey from research to production.”

https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/meta-selects-azure-as-strategic-cloud-provider-to-advance-ai-innovation-and-deepen-pytorch-collaboration/

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Meta's next data center will be in Kansas City

Meta plans to build its newest data center in Kansas City, Missouri.

Meta’s data center will be located in Kansas City’s Golden Plains Technology Park, a 5.5 million-square-foot data center campus. The site will be supported by 100 percent renewable energy. 

The company said it chose Kansas City for its accessible infrastructure and fiber, the deep well of local talent for operations and construction, and collaborative community partners who helped move the project forward quickly.  The data center will represent an investment of more than $800 million and will support approximately 100 jobs.

“Meta is excited to call Kansas City our new home. It stands out with so much to offer - good access to infrastructure and fiber, a strong pool of talent for both construction and operations, and more than anything, great community partners,” said Darcy Nothnagle, director of community and economic development, Meta. “Meta is committed to being a good neighbor and investing in the long-term vitality of the region for years to come.”  

“It’s an exciting day in Kansas City as we celebrate Meta’s investment in our community — yet another example of Kansas City’s growing influence in the technology sector. We look forward to growing this partnership and creating new jobs,” said Kansas City Mayor Quinton Lucas.

https://governor.mo.gov/press-releases/archive/governor-parson-announces-meta-selects-kansas-city-new-800-million-data

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Meta to build data center in Idaho

Meta announced plans for a new data center in Kuna, Idaho. This will be Meta's 15th data center in the United States and 19th worldwide. The company estimates its investment in the project at $800 million.

Kuna is a town of approximately 24,000 located 18 miles (29 km) southwest of downtown Boise, the state capital of Idaho. The elevation is 2,694 ft (821 m).

The Kuna Data Center will run on 100% renewable energy. Meta said the facility will be at least 80% more water efficient than the average data center as the cooling system will rely on outside air for cooling for at least 50% of the year.

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CommScope joins Meta's Evenstar program for O-RAN

CommScope is joining Meta Connectivity's Evenstar program to help accelerate the adoption of Open RAN by developing open reference designs.

CommScope said tis collaboration will focus on developing a Massive MIMO (mMIMO) reference design based on O-RAN Alliance interoperability specifications. Massive MIMO substantially increases spectral efficiency to deliver more network capacity and wider coverage. The two organizations will cooperate on high-level architectural requirements, open standardized antenna and radio interfaces, and best practice calibration designs.

The mMIMO reference design will provide operators with the option to further disaggregate the filter/antenna elements from the radio unit, supporting flexibility and delivering implementation options to the market.

Meta Connectivity is working with control unit and distribution unit software vendors who will manage interoperability testing, while CommScope will support Over-the-Air (OTA) testing and characterization of the antenna within a laboratory environment.

“We are excited to have CommScope’s expertise in innovative antenna interfaces as part of our Evenstar program,” said Jaydeep Ranade, Director of Wireless Engineering at Meta Connectivity. “This collaboration will help facilitate an ecosystem of high-quality connectivity – something that becomes more important every day as we move to an increasingly digitally connected world.”

“CommScope is thrilled to be joining Meta Connectivity’s global Evenstar ecosystem,” said Farid Firouzbakht, senior vice president of Outdoor Wireless Networks, CommScope. “Open RAN is gaining momentum in the marketplace and mMIMO 5G deployments will require cooperation and collaboration between vendors based on competitive reference models.”

http://www.commscope.com

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Meta's next AI supercomputer to use NVIDIA 200 Gb/s InfiniBand fabric

Meta is building an AI research supercomputer that will leverage NVIDIA systems, InfiniBand networking and AI software to enable optimization across thousands of GPUs.

The AI Research SuperCluster (RSC), which will be the largest NVIDIA DGX A100 customer system to date when fully deployed later this year, will deliver 5 exaflops of AI performance.

RSC is powered by 760 NVIDIA DGX A100 systems linked with NVIDIA Quantum 200 Gb/s InfiniBand fabric, delivering 1,896 petaflops of TF32 performance.

Penguin Computing provided managed services and AI-optimized infrastructure for Meta comprised of 46 petabytes of cache storage with its Altus systems. Pure Storage FlashBlade and FlashArray//C provide the highly performant and scalable all-flash storage capabilities needed to power RSC.

https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/2022/01/24/meta-ai-supercomputer-dgx/

 

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Meta deepens relationship with AWS as a strategic cloud provider

 Meta (formerly Facebook) has deepened its relationship with AWS as a strategic cloud provider to complement its existing on-premises infrastructure. 

Meta confirmed that it plans to broaden its use of AWS compute, storage, databases, and security services to provide privacy, reliability, and scale in the cloud. Meta will run third-party collaborations in AWS and use the cloud to support acquisitions of companies that are already powered by AWS. It will also use AWS’s compute services to accelerate artificial intelligence (AI) research and development for its Meta AI group. In addition, Meta and AWS will work together to improve the performance for customers running PyTorch on AWS and accelerate how developers build, train, deploy, and operate artificial intelligence/machine learning models.

The companies will help machine learning researchers and developers by further optimizing PyTorch performance and its integration with core managed services such as Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) and Amazon SageMaker (AWS’s service that helps developers and data scientists build, train, and deploy machine learning models quickly in the cloud and at the edge) for building, training, and deploying artificial intelligence models at scale. 

“Meta and AWS have been expanding our collaboration over the last five years,” said Kathrin Renz, Vice President of Business Development and Industries at Amazon Web Services, Inc. “With this agreement, AWS will continue to help Meta support research and development, drive innovation, and collaborate with third parties and the open-source community at scale. Customers can rely on Meta and AWS to collaborate on PyTorch, making it easier for them to build, train, and deploy deep learning models on AWS.”

“We are excited to extend our strategic relationship with AWS to help us innovate faster and expand the scale and scope of our research and development work,” said Jason Kalich, Vice President of Production Engineering at Meta. “The global reach and reliability of AWS will help us continue to deliver innovative experiences for the billions of people around the world that use Meta products and services and for customers running PyTorch on AWS.”

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Meta’s Minipack2 is powered by Broadcom's Tomahawk 4 silicon

Broadcom confirmed that Meta is now deploying the 25.6 Tbps StrataXGS Tomahawk 4 switch in its data center network fabric.

The Tomahawk4 is now shipping in high volume in Meta’s Minipack2 platform.

“Broadcom is pleased to support Meta and its ecosystem partners on the transition to a leading-edge 25.6Tbps networking fabric,” said Ram Velaga, senior vice president and general manager, Core Switching Group, Broadcom. “Our multi-year collaborative effort has resulted in the successful integration of multiple generations of the marketplace’s highest bandwidth Tomahawk switch chip into Meta’s industry- leading Wedge400 and Minipack2 networking platforms.”

The Tomahawk4 family has been shipping in volume for over one year. Members of the Tomahawk4 family, currently in production, include the Tomahawk4-50G, Tomahawk4-100G and Tomahawk4-12.8T.

The Broadcom Tomahawk3, the Tomahawk4’s predecessor, has been shipping in production since 2018. It has been deployed in Meta’s previous and current generation platforms. 

In addition to Tomahawk4, Minipack2 uses Broadcom’s 7nm Barchetta2, a 16×56-Gb/s full-duplex PHY, featuring demonstrated interoperability with Broadcom merchant switches and ASICs. This 400G/200G/100G retimer is designed with industry-leading 56-Gbps PAM4 Serdes architecture that supports greater than 30dB of insertion loss on both host and line interfaces. 

https://www.broadcom.com

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Meta deploys Cisco for Wedge400C Top of Rack (TOR) switch

At the tenth annual OCP Summit in San Jose, Cisco confirmed that Meta is deploying its Cisco Silicon One Q200L device along with the Wedge400C Top of Rack (TOR) switch. Cisco Q200L uses 7nm technology to provide a 12.8 Tbps solution for web scale switching and routing. The 12.8 Tbps Wedge400C supports up to 16 ports of 400G and 32 ports of 200G.

Meta worked with Cisco to develop and deploy two new next-generation TOR switches. The latest versions of Meta’s Wedge TOR, the Wedge 400 and 400C, offer higher front panel port density, and greater performance for AI and machine learning applications, while also enabling future expansions. The Wedge 400 and 400C have several improvements over the Wedge 100S, including 4x the switching capacity (upgraded from 3.2 Tbps to 12.8 Tbps), 8x the burst absorption performance, and a field-replaceable CPU subsystem.

“Cisco Silicon One is uniquely positioned in the industry to provide a common architecture across the entire network, enabling massive operational efficiencies for our customers,” said Rakesh Chopra, Cisco Fellow, Common Hardware Group Architecture and Platforming, Cisco. “The Q200L is an important part of Cisco’s expanding Silicon One product family and as part of our overall disagg component model, it provides Meta a building block to innovate on top of, at hyperscale efficiency and scale.”

https://newsroom.cisco.com/press-release-content?type=webcontent&articleId=2207937

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