Mozilla, the open-source internet-browser project, has brought online its first wholesale data center suite in Santa Clara, California, Wired reports.

The site, called SCL3, was made live in February in one of three buildings at the data center campus built and operated by Vantage, a young wholesale data center player that gave Silicon Valley’s mission-critical-real-estate old guard a run for their money when it launched its first data center there last year.

Mozilla’s data center requirements have grown to the point where it makes sense to switch from the previous retail-colocation model to wholesale, Matthew Zeier, director of IT operations at Mozilla, wrote in a blog post in November, when he announced the decision to move into the Vantage facility.

“Our hosting needs are radically different than they were five years ago when I started and we had a couple racks in Sunnyvale, (CA),” he wrote. “We’ve reached a point where it makes more sense to look at wholesale data center space.”

At that point, the organization was hosting equipment at six retail-colo sites around the world, three of which were in the Silicon Valley.

The California sites – Layer42, Internap and CoreSite – consumed about 455kW of power total. Mozilla’s other sites are in Phoenix, Amsterdam and Beijing.

The new US$3m suite’s total power capacity is 1MW, of which Mozilla initially deployed only half.

Two SeaMicro low-power server systems are serving Mozilla.org and an associated website out of the data center at the Vantage campus, according to Wired.

SeaMicro is a provider of servers designed specifically for deploying light internet and cloud applications at scale. The company was recently acquired by AMD.

Mozilla’s Firefox was the third most popular internet browser, following Microsoft Internet Explorer and Google Chrome as of April, according to StatCounter.