Yahoo Expanding Nebraska Data Center in $20M Project

While Yahoo may be preparing to make some big and tough decisions to reverse the trend of declining profits, the internet giant continues to invest in data center infrastructure to support its services.

The company announced today plans to expand its data center in La Vista, Nebraska, not far from Omaha. This was the company’s third data center expansion announcement this year, following much bigger expansions at its two other company-owned data center locations in the US – Quincy, Washington, and Lockport, New York.

The first Yahoo data center in La Vista came online in 2010. The company said it plans to add 20,000 square feet of data center space at the site, including a new electrical room and a chiller yard, bringing the facility’s total square footage to 300,000 square feet.

Yahoo expects to spend $20 million on the expansion, Mike Coleman, the company’s senior director of data center operations, wrote in a blog post. The expansion will “increase capacity to power Yahoo products and services for our users,” he wrote.

In October, the company announced plans to effectively double its data center capacity in Quincy. Using its Computing Coop data center design, a shape optimized for free cooling that resembles a chicken coop, Yahoo is adding 300,000 square feet of building space in Washington State.

In April, the company launched a second data center in Lockport, also employing the Computing Coop design. The expansion added two 30,000-square-foot computer rooms and 7.2 MW of power capacity.

In addition to building and operating its own data centers, Yahoo leases data centers from commercial providers, but it has been moving its infrastructure out of those facilities, in many cases subleasing the space it leaves behind that’s still under long-term lease contracts. Other internet companies, most notably Facebook, have done the same, vacating and subleasing wholesale data center space in facilities operated by the likes of Coresite, Vantage Data Centers, Digital Realty Trust, and DuPont Fabros Technology, as they build more of their own data center capacity.

Yahoo also owns and operates a data center in Singapore and leases space in other international locations, Coleman told Data Center Knowledge in an interview earlier this year.

The company is bulking up its team in Lockport, recruiting for positions in data center operations, IT, network infrastructure, reliability engineering, and roles, a company spokesperson wrote in an email.

Yahoo recently hired consultants McKinsey & Co. to analyze the business and decide whether it should get rid of some of its units and accelerate investment in others, Re/Code reported Monday citing anonymous sources.

The report also mentioned a new initiative in the works at Yahoo called Project Index. Details are scarce, but according to Re/Code Project Index will produce a one-stop mobile search product.