Why Facebook Is Investing In a Hardware Lab
Recently, Facebook (NASDAQ:FB) posted a blog about the opening of “Area 404”, a 22,000 square foot fully equipped hardware lab in its Menlo Park office. While Facebook generates most of its revenues from advertisements on its core social media platform, it has hardware-related initiatives intended to amplify or support its main business. These include its Connectivity Labs, the Oculus VR business, and promising research projects including Aquila and OpenCellular. The goal for Area 404 is to offer the various engineering teams a single location equipped with the latest equipment to pursue their projects. As Facebook continues to grow and focuses on immersive social experiences such as virtual reality, it will need intelligent hardware to support its growth. Area 404 should help the company better address these needs.
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Investment In Hardware Essential To Support Future Initiatives, Attract Talent
Connectivity solutions – in the form of Drones, Satellites and technology to beam internet connectivity to remote areas – and Virtual Reality are two critical components of Facebook’s ten year roadmap as the company looks to attract its next billion users and looks at newer ways to engage existing users.
These initiatives require intelligent hardware, as well as collaboration among the company’s various teams. The new hardware lab has room for all of its hardware teams to work collaboratively under the same space. Facebook plans to use the lab for R&D related to several innovative hardware solutions, such as Aquila, its communications network which can beam internet into remote areas, as well as the Surround 360 camera. As Facebook continues to grow in size, investments in hardware will be critical to support its growing network of users and advertisers and to bring new technology – such as VR – to its users.
Supporting The Open Compute Project
In 2011, Facebook launched its own data center to support its growing user base. However, instead of keeping its hardware designs to itself, the company decided to make it open source. The company believed that hardware is not its competitive edge, and therefore allowed hardware engineers to collaborate and share designs, irrespective of their employers. As a consequence, it formed the Open Compute Project to advnace its hardware and software development efforts and the entitiy now exists as an independent organization. Most of the major Tech companies are core memebers of this community and Facebook has contributed its personnel and technology as well. It will maintain a development team within the facility dedicated to integrating OPC technologies into its own massive data center infrastrucure. While open source has been disruptive in software, Facebook appears to be doing the same for hardware. The benefits of this collaboration have been very visible, as Facebook has saved an estimated $2 billion in infrastructure costs through the initiative, and the hardware lab should only further these efforts.
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