Facebook to invest €200mn in new Irish data centre
Mon 15 Jun 2015
Social media giant Facebook has today submitted a planning application for its new €200mn data centre in County Meath, Ireland.
The latest data centre investment will provide 40 more full time jobs, bringing Facebook’s Irish staff to over 1,000 employees. Hundreds of further positions will be created in the build phase. The site will be the company’s fifth data centre globally, and second in Europe.
“We have one of the youngest, well-educated populations in Europe and it’s excellent and very encouraging to see that these companies are continuing to pick Ireland as a source of investment,” said Irish minister for data protection Dara Murphy, who referred to the social network’s plans as “very encouraging.”
According to Facebook, the data centre will be located on a site in an industrially zoned area of Clonee.
The centre will be powered solely by local renewable energy supplies. Facebook already operates an energy efficient data centre in Sweden, which can be controlled remotely by engineers in Dublin using the internal Facebook system Cyborg.
Rachel Paterson, Facebook’s data centre director also commented: “Ireland has been a home for Facebook since 2007 and today’s planning application demonstrates our continued interest to invest in Ireland.”
“We hope to build an innovative, environmentally friendly data centre that will help us continue to connect people in Ireland and around the world while supporting local job creation and Ireland’s successful technology economy,” she added.
Murphy stressed that Ireland would continue to regulate U.S. tech firms effectively. “As we always do in Ireland we will be not found wanting at all when it comes to regulation and enforcement […] We have a strong tradition of independent regulatory bodies in the state and our data protection in particular, while may have been under-resourced in the past, now has significant new resources for the future,” he continued.
