Dalles, Oregon (Google) Built in 2006, this was one of the first server farms to be built ‘from the ground up’, at a cost of £375m ($600m). Situated close to the 2000MW Dalles Dam on the Columbia River, it has the benefits of green, reliable power, and temperatures varying between 30F (-1C) in Winter and highs of 88F (31C) in summer. Prineville, Oregon (Facebook) Facebook opened its first self-built server farm here on October 19, using an air-cooling system to reduce power usage. Nonetheless, Facebook has been criticised by Greenpeace because the power it does use if 63pc coal generated.

Facebook is to build a multi-million pound server farmer on the edge of the Arctic circle to house all its computer servers. But what is a server farm and how much power do they burn? What exactly is a server farm? A server farm brings together hundreds of thousands of servers — the core of a normal personal computer — stacked in racks, linked by routers, and cooled and powered centrally. Up until about decade ago, servers were kept in dedicated rooms at individual companies. But with the growth of the web, companies like Google, Facebook, Apple and Amazon have started building giant centralised server farms, each containing hundreds of thousands of computers. As more and more people save their data online in the ‘cloud’, rather than on their home computers, there is a growing need for more server farms.

Downtown Los Angeles hit 113F (45 Celsius) for a few minutes at about 12:15pm local time, breaking the former record of 112F (44 Celsius) set on June 26, 1990. Temperature records for the area date to 1877. The historic moment came during a series of days well over 100F (38 Celsius) in many cities ranging from Anaheim, home of Disneyland, to San Luis Obispo on the usually balmy Central Coast. Firefighters carried heavy hoses up hills to battle a small but persistent brush fire west of Los Angeles in Thousand Oaks while other workers in less strenuous jobs also struggled through the day