Facebook confirms €200m ‘green’ Irish data centre

Facebook has confirmed it is to start building a new data centre in County Meath, Ireland, that will be powered entirely by renewable energy.

The data centre, which will be located in the village of Clonee, should be operational by the end of 2018, according to a blog post written by Facebook’s vice president of infrastructure Tom Furlong.

The data centre will be Facebook’s second in Europe, with the other one located in Luleå, Sweden. Ireland has been home to Facebook’s European headquarters since 2009, and the social media giant said that the new data centre will continue its investment into the country and Europe.

“Clonee will be packed full of cutting-edge technology, making it one of the most advanced, efficient and sustainable data centers in the world,” wrote Furlong.

“All the racks, servers, and other components have been designed and built from scratch as part of the Open Compute Project, an industry-wide coalition of companies dedicated to creating energy- and cost-efficient infrastructure solutions and sharing them as open source.”

Facebook originally submitted planning application for the data centre back in June 2015, where the company garnered a favourable reception for the build.

The Irish minister for jobs, enterprise and innovation, Richard Bruton, who had been speaking with Facebook, said: “We have specifically targeted data centres as part of our Action Plan for jobs – this is an area particularly well suited to our climate and infrastructure, and holds the capacity to bring much-needed jobs and investment to regions where jobs are not growing as quickly.”

The 31,00sqm data centre is set to cost €200 million (£152m), and will initially support 2,000 jobs during construction, reported the Irish Times.

The newspaper cited head of Facebook Ireland Gareth Lambe, who said: “We want to innovate in Europe and for Europeans, and the Clonee data centre will house some of the big breakthroughs Facebook has made in this area.

Like its predecessors, this project will generate hundreds of millions of euros in economic activity and support hundreds of jobs in the local community.”