This week saw two big announcements for new data center builds in Ireland.
Amazon Expansion
Amazon is set to expand its already vast Irish footprint as it plans to erect a 20,700m2 data center building in the north-west of Dublin, in a piece of land owned by the Irish Industrial Development Authority (IDA) and totaling 26 acres. The new building is estimated to cost around €200m. Amazon has plans to expand the campus with seven extra buildings, set to be smaller than the first one; the additional investment would be €700m.
The development, code-named Project G, is expected to break ground at some point in 2017. The data center is predicted to be turned online 18 months after construction works start. Once completed, the new Dublin data center sitting next to Facebook’s Clonee facility will take Amazon’s footprint in the Irish capital alone to close to ten buildings.
New Data Center for an unnamed “World-Class American IT Company”.
Amazon’s data center is the second big development for Ireland announced this week after Bouygues Energies & Services unveiled on 8 March it has been contracted to build a €100m, 11,000m2 data center in Dublin. The first phase of the data center will be handed over in June 2017, with completion scheduled for January 2018 (this data center will be built within an existing warehouse). This data center will store data for an unnamed “world-class American IT company”.
New Data Center Builds in Ireland
Both developments join a growing data center ecosystem in Ireland, and in particular in Dublin with more than 30 data centers for companies including Interxion, Digital Realty, Google, Microsoft, Facebook and IBM.
In 2016, over $2bn worth of data center investments have been announced in Ireland. Building on this, Data Economy has looked into five of the main data center projects that were under development and/or construction in past November in Ireland.
Microsoft
- Project: Expansion of data center campus
- Site: Dublin
- Investment: €900m
- Microsoft is in charge of one of the largest data center projects currently under construction in Ireland. In May 2016, the company was given the go ahead for a $1bn data center campus that will account for more than 70,000m2 of hosting floor. The site is located at Grange Castle Business Park, Clondalkin, and will cover more than 70-acre of land.
Apple
- Project: New data center
- Site: Galway
- Investment: €850m
- Apple is fast expanding its data center fleet and is investing in total €1.7bn since February 2015 in its data center expansion in Europe. In Ireland, the company has unveiled a project to build a €850m facility that will include 24,400m2 of hosting space sitting on a 500-acre site in Derrydonnell Forest.
Facebook
- Project: New data center
- Site: Co. Meath
- Investment: €200m
- Also making to the list of massive data center investments in the island, Facebook is currently building a 31,000m2 facility in a 220-acre site. Permission for the hub’s construction was granted in January 2016. Facebook’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg has said on Facebook that the Clonee Data Center will be one of the most advanced and energy efficient data centers in the world. The data center is expected to come online by 2018.
JDC Group
- Project: New data center
- Site: Cork
- Investment: €200m
- Commercial property company JDC Group is also planning the built of a €200m data center just outside Cork City. JDC Group has secured a 60MW grid connection with local provider Eirgrid which will keep the new 25,000m2 data center powered up. Construction is expected to start in August 2017.
EdgeConnex
- Project: New data center
- Site: Dublin
- Investment: €30m
- US colo EdgeConneX has entered a phase of data center assets expansion and included Dublin in its roadmap. The company has plans to build a €30m facility which will measure up to 5,700m2. The site will be the company’s second data center in Europe after Amsterdam, in the Netherlands. The company has said the first building will use 10MW from the national grid. An additional 8MW will be generated using natural-gas turbines.
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