Jay Park began by studying civil engineering in college, but he soon switched to chemical engineering then finally moved on to electrical engineering. “Controlling power is what I love,” he says.

On September 23, 2012, the New York Times ran a page-one article under the headline “Power, Pollution and the Internet.” Detailing the wasteful use of energy and water in data centers—especially those run by the largest and most recognized Internet-based companies—the roughly 4,300-word report ruffled many feathers in the digital world. But, its criticisms had (and continue to have) some validity.

The use of energy and water (mostly for cooling, which the hot servers generate a considerable demand for) has been a tertiary concern in the ongoing hypergrowth era of the information revolution. E-commerce is an inventive and evolving industry on steroids, after all, where everyone from entrepreneurs to programmers to engineers are working 24–7 to devise smarter ways of doing what they do. Matters of resource use have fallen by the wayside because being the fastest, most robust, and failsafe is what has proven to be the real difference between a $140 billion IPO (for Facebook) and a $545 million loss (which Rupert Murdoch ate on MySpace).

The reality of energy and water overuse in data centers is still real in many quarters, but it’s now a bit behind the times with regard to the work of Facebook—particularly that of Jay Park, the company’s vice president of data-center design, construction, and facility operations. In earlier stages of its explosive growth, the company operated under service-level agreements with third-party data centers (known as colocation companies), but when Park joined in 2009, he was the first person on staff whose mission was to build the company its own more efficient data center. And, he had to do it on a pace that matched the growth of the social networking behemoth, which went from 350 million users in 2009 to 1 billion by the end of 2012.
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