It’s only when you reach the summit of Mount Crushmore in a 4×4 utility vehicle that you can fully grasp the immense investment Facebook Inc. (Nasdaq: FB) is making in Gallatin, about 35 miles northeast of Nashville.
The man-made peak rises roughly 40 feet in the air, a heap of 1.1 million cubic yards of rock unearthed and piled high after blasting for Facebook’s $800 million data center now under construction. The aptly named mountain will vanish by the time construction is done, as machines grind it into gravel to be used elsewhere on the more-than-800-acre construction site.
Facebook officials and workers with DPR Construction showcased progress on their 982,000-square-foot data center during a July 8 media tour. Work is almost 25% complete, on pace to open in 2023 as scheduled.
Workers are making a building shaped like a capital H, which will be filled with servers storing data from some of Facebook’s 2.85 billion monthly active users, including on platforms Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger and Oculus.
The scale of the work is hard to capture. Each leg of that “H” is as long as an aircraft carrier, or roughly four football fields. The project requires so much concrete that SRM Concrete, or Smyrna Ready Mix LLC, erected a concrete-making “batch plant” on the property.
As if that isn’t enough, plans Facebook previously submitted to the city and the state outline future potential data centers elsewhere on the property. Such expansion would mirror what Facebook has done at other data center sites in Utah, Ohio, Oregon and elsewhere. Mount Crushmore sits on what used to be a 72-acre cornfield, and what could become another H-shaped data center, according to those plans and a couple of aerial maps displayed at the construction site.
“This is a mega-project. There’s not that many of these around,” said Joshua Craft, Facebook’s lead construction manager for the project.
“If Facebook determines a need [for more capacity] in the future, this site could definitely be considered,” Craft said. “We obviously would have room.”
