The Russians Are Coming … To Facebook

It probably won’t warrant its own song by Sting, but the Russians are coming … to Facebook.

“Ya ne govoru po,” right?

According to Bloomberg, the California-based social networking giant has received a $200 million cash infusion from a Moscow-based technology firm known as Digital Sky, money that will help Facebook invest in new servers for its growing network.

Well, at least that’s what one half of the money will do.

From the story:

Facebook, which makes money from online advertising, is counting on its surging popularity to help it overcome the worst ad market for Internet companies since the dot-com bust. The increased traffic on Facebook requires more capacity in data centers, the rooms of servers that manage the Web site.

“Facebook has been growing in leaps and bounds in terms of users, and you can expect that to be impacting their hosting costs,” said Jeremiah Owyang, an analyst at Forrester Research Inc. “It’s been some time since they had a large injection of cash.”

The investment from Digital Sky also will allow Facebook employees to sell their shares in the company. Digital Sky plans to buy at least $100 million of Facebook’s common stock.

Why is the movie Eastern Promises coming to mind all of a sudden? Seriously, you never take the money and run … not when Russians are involved, anyway.

Digital Sky’s investment gets it a 1.96% stake of Facebook, incidentally, which was valued at $10 billion in the deal.

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