Facebook has announced that its data center in Prineville, OR, has received LEED Gold Certification from the U.S. Green Building Council. Several pioneering technologies have made it one of the most energy efficient data centers in the in the world, according to the company. These systems include:

• One-hundred percent outside air evaporative cooling that requires no cooling towers or chillers. While typical buildings require energy-intensive cooling towers or chillers to keep their interiors at the right temperatures for servers, the Prineville data center has no cooling tower and no chiller. Instead, it uses a highly sophisticated, low-energy design that draws cool outside air from the atmosphere into the building that it then cooled further through evaporation.