Yahoo To Invest $500 Million In Infrastructure

Yahoo is planning to invest $500 million to expand their data center infrastructure. The ‎existing data centers in the states of Buffalo, Omaha and Washington would see a major ‎overhaul and new facilities established in Switzerland and Singapore.‎

Approval to build new data centers at an investment of half a billion dollars has already ‎been obtained. Yahoo would move over to these highly efficient facilities in due course. ‎Yahoo had come out with their Yahoo Computing Coop last year, a design that replaces ‎mechanical cooling with factory-built components relying on fresh air.‎

Yahoo inaugurated their 155,000-square-foot data center facility based on the Yahoo’s ‎Computing Coop. design at Lockport, New York recently. The facility recorded a power ‎usage effectiveness of 1.08, as against the industry average of 1.92.‎

The construction of their Switzerland data center at Avenches had begun. This facility ‎would also have a similar low PUE rating. The Switzerland facility would incorporate the ‎YCC design while retrofitting an existing building, the first to implement a retrofit YCC ‎design. Around 20 smaller data centers would be built to function as ‘edge pods’, ie data ‎centers used to store content located adjacent to users, to support caching and content ‎delivery functions.‎

The new data centers would be built at costs averaging a little less than $5 million ‎per megawatt of electric power, which in turn translates into an addition of 100 ‎megawatts of capacity for Yahoo’s data center expansion plans.‎