Facebook seeks to build $1 billion Virginia data center

In an interesting turn of events Facebook is now seeking to build a huge data center in Virginia. The purpose and function of this data center remains unclear at the time of this writing. This coincides with news that AOL is finally shutting down it's AOL INSTANT MESSAGE app. The shutdown of AIM and the central data center of Facebook highlight the problems associated with centralization in general. First what exactly would require a data center to cost $1 billion? Is the data going to be stored locally? What are their cybersecurity procedures or are we going to be at risk for a Yahoo scale breach in the future?

There are rumors that Mark Zuckerberg intends to run for President someday as well so the push to build a huge data center in Virginia will create jobs for US Citizens potentially.

Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe, a Democrat, announced Thursday that Facebook will build its next data center in Henrico County, which is just outside Richmond.

Facebook (FB, Tech30) plans to invest $1 billion in the state in all. The company is putting $750 million into construction and $250 million to multiple solar facilities that will power the data center, McAuliffe said.

Is it a political or technical motive behind the location of this data center? If it's powered by solar then I could think of better locations than Virginia.

References

1. http://money.cnn.com/2017/10/05/technology/facebook-data-center-virginia/index.html
2. http://money.cnn.com/2017/10/03/technology/business/yahoo-breach-3-billion-accounts/index.html
3. https://techcrunch.com/2017/10/06/aol-instant-messenger-shut-down/