Facebook to build new data center in Ireland

Facebook is building a data center in Ireland. It is the second computer center in Europe and the first to be located in Ireland. Facebook will use hardware and software based on its Open Compute Project at the new location.

Construction of the data center will start soon in Clonee, Ireland, just outside Dublin, and it should be operational in late 2017 or early 2018. It will be the sixth data center worldwide for the social network. Facebook already has a data center in Luleå, Sweden, which is cooled by, among other things, the cold outside air.

According to Facebook, the Irish data center runs ‘100 percent’ on sustainable energy, mainly thanks to wind turbines. The company has set itself the goal of running half of its infrastructure on renewable energy by the end of 2018.

In addition, the company uses new designs of racks, servers and other systems that come from the Open Compute Project. This project was set up by Facebook to design more efficient computing center systems and to make as much documentation about it publicly available.

It is not known whether the data center will mainly be used for the storage of data from Europeans. Several tech companies, such as Oracle, are increasingly doing this. There has been no basis for transferring data from Europeans to the US for months since the European Court of Justice declared the Safe Harbor agreement invalid in early October in a case between Facebook and Maximillian schrems.