Overview
Facebook (now Meta) launched Project Freedom circa 2008 under Jonathan Hiliger's direction, seeking to free itself from reliance on Dell, HP, and other OEMs by building cost-optimized, workload-specific open hardware. The initiative grew into the Open Compute Project (OCP), formally launched in 2011, which became the primary industry consortium for open data center hardware specifications. Facebook's core insight — that hyperscalers should design hardware for specific workloads rather than using Swiss-army-knife OEM products — defined the founding philosophy of OCP and influenced manufacturers like Jabil to adopt modular, workload-tunable building-block strategies.
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