Prineville became home to Facebook’s first purpose-built data center.
Facebook selected the central Oregon town for a large facility that opened in 2011. The site was designed to support the enormous computing and storage demands created by photographs, messages, videos, profiles, and other Facebook services.
The Prineville project attracted attention because Facebook published information about its energy-efficient designs through the Open Compute Project. That initiative shared hardware and data-center engineering ideas publicly, rather than keeping every design proprietary. The approach influenced later infrastructure work across the technology industry.
The facility is often confused with Facebook’s first office or corporate headquarters, both of which were in California. Prineville is significant specifically because it was the company’s first major purpose-built data-center location. Facebook and later Meta built or operated additional data centers in several countries and U.S. states as its services expanded.