The rumble of backhoes and bulldozers on the outskirts of this city of 10,000 is sweet music to a municipality that has lost hundreds of blue- and white-collar jobs in the recession. With a combination of cheap power and favorable climate, Prineville is joining the region's new gold rush: housing electronic data.

Facebook, Inc. has promised to spend $175 million over the next three years to build a 145,000-square-foot data-storage farm.

NASA, which had been planning to build a new enterprise data center estimated to cost $1.5 billion, has done an abrupt about-face, announcing late last month that it was planning major changes to its data center strategy.
In an announcement posted on the site of NASA's long-term, multi-billion dollar IT transformation project, the Information Technology Infrastructure Integration Program (I3P), NASA said that it was postponing the release of a long-awaited request for proposal for the new data center in light of new White House policies and leadership changes at NASA.

"NASA intends to create

Two billion people worldwide do their cooking on open fires, producing sooty pollution that shortens millions of lives and exacerbates global warming. If widely adopted, a new generation of inexpensive, durable cook stoves could go a long way toward alleviating this problem.