Tech giant Google announced on March 9 that it is joining the Open Compute Project, an organization that counts some of the world's biggest tech companies as member including Facebook. The main vision of the organization is for companies to share designs of their data center infrastructure in order to push cross-company development as well as the adoption of newly developed technologies.

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Google's decision to join the Open Compute Project came as a bit of a surprise for the tech community. First, the organization was started by social networking giant Facebook about six years ago and it is no longer a secret in the tech world that Facebook and Google are rivals in different platforms.

Moreover, Facebook followed Google's practice of building data centers that are optimized for their own workloads. The thing is, some of the people who worked on Google's data centers eventually joined Facebook.

Another reason why Google joining Open Compute Project was a surprise is the fact that Microsoft, a well-known Google competitor in the cloud platform business, has been a member of the organization since 2014, according to Venture Beat. Tech analysts are keen to know how the two companies will react to each other now that they are part of one initiative.

The biggest question now is whether the leader in the public cloud market Amazon Web Services will also join the foray now that Google has already dipped its toes in.

According to PC World, Google will contribute specifications for a 48-volt server rack power distribution that the company uses on its data centers. Most data centers still use a 12-volt server rack. The search engine giant is also expected to share the technology it uses for its server racks and other equipment that it uses.

Regarding Facebook's contribution in the organization, the Menlo Park-based tech giant will share its designs for its non-volatile memory flash storage appliance.

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