Facebook has opened a new data center, in the small town of Altoona, Iowa, aimed at serving the center of the U.S. and boasting a new approach in data center design and energy efficiency.

The new data center is supporting traffic created by the social network's 1.35 billion Facebook users, and goes beyond a simple data center in that it uses next-generation technology to speed up machine-to-machine traffic.

"Along with our Prineville, Forest City, and Lulea data centers, Altoona is now one of the cornerstones of the global infrastructure that brings Facebook to you every day," said the company in a statement. "Like our other data centers, Altoona is cooled by 100 percent outside air, and it features the latest in hyper-efficient Open Compute Project gear. Altoona is also our first data center to take advantage of our innovative new networking fabric, which will help us scale much more efficiently as more and more people connect on Facebook around the world."

In the past, when companies wanted to build computer networks to run online operations, they took a tier approach, creating a network "core" using powerful networking equipment. A smaller tier, which is able to move less data, would then be connected to the core. An even smaller tier would connect to that tier and so on. This would continue until the network was able to reach the computer servers housing software people wanted to use.

What Facebook has done is move to cheaper equipment at the core, abandoning the tier model and use simpler gear across its entire network. By creating a new way for traffic to be routed across the network, Facebook is able to substantially improve the efficiency of its data center.

"The amount of traffic from Facebook to Internet -- we call it "machine to user" traffic -- is large and ever increasing, as more people connect and as we create new products and services," said Alexey Andreyev, a network engineer at Facebook. "However, this type of traffic is only the tip of the iceberg. What happens inside the Facebook data centers -- "machine to machine" traffic -- is several orders of magnitude larger than what goes out to the Internet."

The data center is not just efficient, but also green, being powered by 100 percent renewable energy.

"Thanks to a new wind project in nearby Wellsburg, Iowa, Altoona will be powered by 100 percent renewable energy, as tracked by renewable energy certificates," continued the statement by Facebook. "In addition to bringing more jobs and investment to the area, Wellsburg adds 140 MW of new renewable energy to the grid in Iowa -- more than what our data center will require for the foreseeable future."