Tech giant Google has been given the green light to build its second Irish data centre.
Dublin County Council has granted planning permission for the new €150m centre, which will be built beside an existing facility opened in 2012 in Clondalkin in Dublin 22.
Planning permission has now been granted for the second data centre. It includes the construction of a 30,361 sqm, two storey data storage facility and additional outbuildings and parking for 83 cars on the just over 11-hectare site.
Google employs more that 2,500 people in Ireland, mainly at its office complex at Barrow Street in Dublin 4.
The new build will create an estimated 300 construction jobs as well as an anticipated 60 new full-time jobs at the data centre itself.
Data centres are large-scale warehouses used to house stacks of computer servers that ultimately power the internet by providing the physical capacity to store masses of data remotely – the so-called cloud.
Google’s planning permission comes hot on the heels of other major investments by multinationals such as Microsoft and by domestic player Eircom
Last year, Microsoft said it would spend €170m to expand its Europe, Middle East and Africa data centre, also in Clondalkin. Eircom, meanwhile, could invest as much as €200m on the massive new data centre complex it is planning for the same west Dublin suburb.
The company, in which US-based private equity group Blackstone is the single biggest shareholder, is planning to build a two-storey data centre that will extend over nearly 144 sqm.