Apple to Spend €1.7B for 2 New Euro Cloud Datacenters
Apple has announced that they will spend €1.7B on two datacenters in Europe. The proposed datacenters will be built in Denmark and Ireland.
Many technology analysts have commented that these regions tend to be popular for companies wanting to establish European datacenter presences because of the free cooling and renewable energy resources that are available. Since the EU and Euro regions are rapidly instituting more regulations concerning data privacy, some international providers such as Apple are scrambling to build a presence now before it becomes more difficult to do so in the future.
Sources report that each datacenter will be built with the intention to hosting all of Apple’s cloud services in the Euro region. That includes services such as iCloud, the App Store and more. Each datacenter will contain 166,000 square meters of floor space. Apple believes the two datacenters will go live in by 2017.
Apple mentions that they will split the €1.7B fund in half and spend the money proportionally on each site. The announcement of Apple’s new European datacenters are expected to create hundreds of high tech, high paying jobs for the respective areas. It is being reported that Apple has chosen County Galway in Ireland while using the central Jutland area in Denmark for the location of its two new datacenters.
In press releases, Apple mentions that the facilities will run “entirely on clean, renewable energy sources from day one.” Apple also notes that they will engage local businesses in its efforts to “Develop additional renewable energy projects from wind or other sources to provide power in the future.” Tim Cook says that this is Apple’s biggest project in Europe to date.
As of now, Apple is getting the land ready in Ireland to begin building. Apple is reportedly moving trees that it has displaced into the Derrydonnell Forest. In Denmark, Apple is doing much of the same. Heat being displaced from the Denmark datacenter will be used by the local heating & utility company as the datacenter will be built near an electrical substation.
