Google is going to build a new data center in the municipality of Groningen
Google has bought twenty hectares of land from the municipality of Groningen and is going to build a data center on it. The data center will be a maximum of eight hectares in size. Construction should start in the fall of 2023.
It had been known for some time that a new data center would be built in the municipality of Groningen. The municipality would have been approached in 2020 with plans for the data center by an unknown party at the time. It now appears that it concerns Google, which also has a data center in Eemshaven.
The building will be located at the Westpoort industrial estate, west of the Groningen district of Hoogkerk, writes RTV Noord. Google says it is a “small-scale satellite facility” of about eight hectares. The data center is necessary because “more and more people use digital resources and organizations are switching en masse to working from the cloud,” the company says.
Construction plans data center Groningen Westpoort.
Groningen alderman Carine Bloemhoff (PvdA) says that the municipality has set ‘strict requirements for the project’. “Green and water must be installed around the data center. The roof of the data center will also be covered with at least 70 percent solar panels,” says the alderman. According to Bloemhoff, the residual heat from the data center must ‘benefit the Groningen Heat Network’. In addition, it should create about 125 permanent jobs, writes NU.nl, among others, based on the ANP news agency. It is not known how much money will be spent on the construction of the data center.
The arrival of the data center is a sensitive issue in local politics. The coalition agreement states that no new data centers may be added in the municipality. However, the arrival of the ‘small’ data center had already been planned for some time and that is why construction continues. Due to the size of the data center, it does not fall under the stricter rules for building hyperscale data centers. These are at least ten hectares in size.