Facebook Saved 'Over $1 Billion' By Inventing Its Own Computers

Business Insider/Julie Bort
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg
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."
Billionaire investor Mark Mobius says he's been able to get his money out of China, but investing in the country is still a 'dilemma' amid national security laws
The Carnival cruise passenger who went overboard and remains missing was on his first cruise and it became his 'happy place,' his fiancée said
My fiancé and I picked out my engagement ring together before he proposed, and I don't regret missing out on the surprise
Attractiveness of gold depends on US Fed's moves, say analysts
Coal India’s ₹4,000 crore offer for sale subscribed 4x times
Nvidia's Jensen Huang started with a $10 million failure before shifting gears to become a $1 trillion company
Meet the top Nifty50 performers in FY23
Apple to declare the 12-inch MacBook as obsolete on June 30