Dive Brief:

• Facebook is doing its best to turn the building of data centers into an assembly line process that Henry Ford might recognize.
• The company's Rapid Deployment Data Center approach uses components designed by an in-house team to create buildings that the company hopes can be brought in and assembled anywhere in the world.
• For an addition to a data center it opened last year in Luleå, Sweden, Facebook is scheduling half the time for construction and deployment that it has scheduled in the past.

Dive Insight:

For the rapid center, a 12-foot-by-40-foot "chassis" is built and has portions of infrastructure attached at a factory, such as lights and cable trays. Two of the frames are placed on steel posts at the data center site, and they become the canopy under which the server racks reside, and the structure is closed in with roof panels and wall units made in standardized 8-foot segments that can be shipped over standard routes without any special hauling permits needed.