This is a five-axis milling machine, which can tilt and twirl prototypes in order to create very accurate and precise cuts.
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Going further inside, you pass through a series of doors and enter one of the brightest interior rooms you’ll ever see.
A super-high-pressure waterjet cuts straight through metal in Facebook’s Area 404 lab. Matt Weinberger/Business InsiderFacebook CEO and all-around wunderkind Mark Zuckerberg can do a lot of things.
While other tech companies no doubt have hardware labs, Facebook designed Area 404 from the ground up and believes it is a one-of-a-kind operation.
Called Area 404, the 22,000-square-foot space will house the majority of Facebook’s modeling, prototyping, and failure analysis. That should reduce the time between successive iterations of new products from weeks to days, the company says.
The lab, the cost of which Facebook declines to reveal, won’t replace Facebook’s existing hardware-oriented labs, such as the Aquila Internet-access drone hangar in the United Kingdom or the Oculus virtual-reality headset facility in Seattle.
Instead, Facebook has led an industry effort to develop more energy-efficient computer centers by sharing server designs with other companies.
Staffed with dedicated people trained in the use of the machines, the lab is divided into two main areas.
The lab has long workbenches for electrical engineers to spread out their gear and a room full of the lathes and milling machines, each the size of a small truck. The machine weighs 60,000 pounds, which is one of the reasons Facebook had to tear up the lab’s floor during construction and reinforce it with more than 100 concrete and steel pylons that extend 60 feet into the earth.
When Oculus was first acquired by Facebook, one of the questions asked by many Oculus fans was “will Oculus be swallowed up by the social network?”
This is not Facebook’s first foray into hardware.
It’s not a factory for mass-producing smartphones or other consumer products. It’s a leap for companies that made their fortune on bits to make things composed of atoms.
Facebook is known as a software company, and rightfully so: It makes a ton of money building software to power mobile apps that sell mobile ads it then shows to billions of people around the world.
The lab will be a space for engineers to design energy-efficient servers for Facebook data centers, test new laser mounts and drone propellers and ideal a prototype 360-degree video camera that Facebook unveiled at a conference in April.
That gives the company plenty of leeway to invest in new ventures. The engineers of Facebook always needed to prototype the new hardware projects that they were working on, but the resources for the tasks were previously “not found” within Facebook’s facilities.
As Facebook has moved into new areas of technology over the years, it has opened up a number of hardware labs focused on specific types of research, noted Burns, a computer numerical control model maker, and Greaves, a mechanical/power manager.
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It’s a massive upgrade from where Facebook’s tinkering in the physical world started.
