X, the company formerly known as Twitter, claims to have saved $100 million annually as a result of exiting its Sacramento data center.
The company, in a post to the X social media platform by its engineering team, said of the data center shutdown: "In total, we freed up 48MW of capacity and tore down 60,000 lbs of network ladder rack before re-provisioning it to other data centers."
Reports that the company was exiting the Sacramento facility were revealed in December 2022, alongside plans to downsize the data center in Atlanta, Georgia. In June 2023, Elon Musk's Tesla signed a lease on the Sacramento data center.
In total, X's decision to exit the property required the moving and re-provisioning of 5,200 racks and 148,000 servers.
The company also claims to have made significant savings by repatriating some of its workloads to on-prem data centers.
"This shift has reduced our monthly cloud costs by 60 percent. Among the changes we made was a shift of all media/blob artifacts out of the cloud, which reduced our overall cloud data storage size by 60 percent, and separately, we succeeded in reducing cloud data processing costs by 75 percent," claims the post.
X/Twitter has been in the news several times this year for reportedly failing to pay its cloud computing bills.
In November 2022, the company was attempting to renegotiate deals with Amazon and Oracle. In March 2023, reports arose that the company had refused to pay its $70m AWS bill, and in retaliation, AWS had refused to pay for its adverts.
In June 2023, the company refused to pay its Google Cloud bill according to reports, though ultimately resolved this issue. That same month saw the company fail to pay Oracle after months of cloud computing costs owed.
The company also cited other accomplishments including that it had "Built on-prem GPU supercomputing clusters and designed, developed, and delivered 43.2Tbps of new network fabric architecture to support the clusters."
X purchased 10,000 GPUs for an artificial intelligence project in April 2023, a transaction that was estimated to be in the tens of millions of dollars. The clusters are housed in one of Twitter/X's two data centers, but its unclear which.
X further reports having scaled its network backbone capacity and redundancy, thus saving around $13.9 million per year, and has started automated peak traffic failover tests.
Elon Musk commenced his acquisition of X (then Twitter) in April 2022, completing the deal in October. The following month saw mass layoffs after it was revealed that Musk was looking to save $1bn in infrastructure costs due to the company's debt interest repayments.
During the acquisition period, Twitter experienced a series of outages in July, September, and again in November, followed by February, and March in 2023.
