Facebook's Cloud Center consumes $1.5 Mn per Month on Electricity and Bandwidth!

This is the price you have to pay, or as some call it investing in the future. Facebook apparently is eating a million dollar a month on electricity bills and half million on bandwidth consumption. That is massive. I guess its time to host their stuff someplace else, maybe at Amazon AWS?

Lets hope the Dubai lords are also smitten by the social bug. Obviously the environmental discussion will follow soon when I write about the dangers of not just the effects on the economic meltdown but also the meltdown of the data centers as we keep uploading pictures of beers and bras (See Nick's post here) on Facebook. I sometimes really wonder how useful Facebook really is, talk about oversubscription. Let's not call electricity a bitch,we just have to get real. These are pragmatic times and money isn't coming easy this time.

This week, the TechCruncher has reported, Facebook chief financial officer Gideon Yu is in Dubai, "possibly" discussing fund raising options with Dubai International Capital, the private equity firm owned by the city's ruler - who also happens to be the Prime Minister of the United Arab Emirates.

Sources told Arrington that Facebook is spending "well over" a million dollars a month in electricity alone and "likely" another $500,000 for bandwidth, as shameless social networkers post billions of photos and other solipsistic pixels. Recently, the company said that users upload two to three terabytes of photos each day. And every second, it serves as many as 300,000 pics the other way.

The word from TechCrunch is that Facebook has set aside $100m to buy 50,000 servers this year and next. And it's supposedly buying a $2m NetApp storage system each and every week.

All this should be taken with a grain of salt. That said, we wouldn't be surprised if mammoth electricity bills have Zuckerberg and Co. sidestepping a melting US economy for large money bags in the Middle East.

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