Google to build air-cooled data centre in Dublin
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New €75 million facility will provide 200 construction jobs and 30 permanent jobs, says Ireland's Industrial Development Agency
Google plans to build a new €75 million data centre in West Dublin, Ireland's Industrial Development Agency revealed today.
The facility will use air cooling technology that the web giant has been trialling in an existing rented data centre also in Dublin, the IDA said. "This technology takes advantage of Ireland’s naturally cool climate and uses outside air to cool computers instead of costly and energy-hungry air-conditioning units."
The project to build the data centre will create 200 construction jobs, while the facility itself will employ 30 people on an ongoing basis. A Google spokesperson told Information Age that the new data centre will run a variety of Google's services including search, Google+, Gmail and Google Documents.
"The global cloud computing industry offers Ireland a massive opportunity for jobs and economic growth," said Richard Bruton, Ireland's minister for jobs, enterprise and innovation. "I am determined that government will act decisively to seize that opportunity."
The success that Dublin has had in attracting cloud computing providers became apparent last month, when a power outage in the city took down both Microsoft's hosted productivity software BPOS and Amazon's EC2 web service.
Google recently launched another new data centre in Hamina, Finland, which uses cold water from the Baltic Sea as its cooling system. Earlier this week, it announced that it has signed a lease for a property in London's Old Street area, where it plans to create a "launchpad" for local technology start-ups.
Also this week, micro-blogging service Twitter announced that it will locate its new international headquarters in Dublin.
