Nov 12, 2010 13:32 GMT  ·  By

Facebook is now getting ready to build its second data center, even as its first is still under construction. The social network plans to build a data center in North Carolina to serve the US East Coast. The project is expected to cost $450 million and will take 18 months to complete.

“After a rigorous review of sites across the East Coast, we are pleased to locate our new data center in Rutherford County. The team we will hire here will help us provide faster, more reliable and more robust service to people around the world who rely on Facebook to connect and share,” said Tom Furlong, Director of Site Operations for Facebook.

“We are very grateful to the officials in Rutherford County and the State of North Carolina whose time, effort and commitment were instrumental in making this happen,” he added.

The build site will employ 250 people during construction and will then create 35 to 45 permanent jobs at the data center.

The company already leases data centers in the region and at several other locations to handle its massive computing, storage and bandwidth requirements.

The site has over 500 million users world wide who spend a significant amount of time on it. It is already the world's largest photo sharing service and stores billions of images.

Facebook has been working on speeding up the site and, while much of this is achieved with optimization and new technologies, but data centers also play a crucial role.

Their proximity to the actual users helps improve latency and get content faster to them, making the location of data centers rather important.

Several other big internet companies have chosen North Carolina to build data centers, including Apple, which is building a massive $1 billion installation, as well as Google, IBM and others.