Facebook Saved 'Over $1 Billion' By Inventing Its Own Computers
Business Insider/Julie Bort
Thanks to OCP, Facebook has saved "more than a $1 billion in the last three years," CEO Mark Zuckerberg told attendees of the OCP Summit in San Jose, Calif.
A lot of big Internet companies, like Google and Amazon, also design their own hardware, but they treat their homegrown technology as a secret, a competitive advantage.
OCP is unique because it gives Facebook's tech away for free. And it has invited others to contribute, too, a concept called "open-source hardware."
"When you're the first company to design something, sometimes there's an advantage to keeping it proprietary and secret," Zuckerberg explained. "For us it was much better to collaborate with the community and ... deliver something that could blow past what anyone else had done."
In the three years that OCP has been around, it has attracted a large community of hardware users and startups, including one launched by a 17-year-old electrical engineering prodigy this week.
All of them are trying to build faster, better, cheaper servers, storage, networks and other associated data center equipment (like server racks).
Even Microsoft, another company that runs huge data centers all over the world to serve up Bing, Xbox Live and cloud computing, has decided to share its custom-designed servers with the OCP community, PC World's John Ribeiro reports.
In addition to saving money, Zuckerberg says that OCP equipment is greener. It has allowed Facebook to save enough energy to power 40 million homes, and it has reduced carbon emissions "the equivalent to taking 50,000 cars off the road for a year."
He adds: "If we can bring those kinds of savings and those kinds of efficiencies to other companies as well, that's great, and we're really proud of that."
- In second consecutive week of decline, forex kitty drops $2.28 bn to $640.33 bn
- SBI Life Q4 profit rises 4% to ₹811 crore
- IMD predicts severe heatwave conditions over East, South Peninsular India for next five days
- COVID lockdown-related school disruptions will continue to worsen students’ exam results into the 2030s: study
- India legend Yuvraj Singh named ICC Men's T20 World Cup 2024 ambassador
- JNK India IPO allotment date
- JioCinema New Plans
- Realme Narzo 70 Launched
- Apple Let Loose event
- Elon Musk Apology
- RIL cash flows
- Charlie Munger
- Feedbank IPO allotment
- Tata IPO allotment
- Most generous retirement plans
- Broadcom lays off
- Cibil Score vs Cibil Report
- Birla and Bajaj in top Richest
- Nestle Sept 2023 report
- India Equity Market