City of the clouds: Amazon to build €1bn Dublin data centre campus

10 Mar 2017

Image: seantb92/Shutterstock

Amazon submits plans for €1bn data centre campus in west Dublin.

Tech giant Amazon has submitted plans to Fingal County Council to construct an enormous €1bn data centre in Mulhuddart, Co Dublin.

The proposed 223,000 sq ft data centre will be close to the biopharma facility built by Bristol-Myers Squibb, according to the Irish Independent.

The data centre itself will cost €200m to build but a further investment of more than €700m will go into creating a data storage campus, with a series of smaller data centres for storage purposes.

For some months now, reports had been surfacing that Amazon had been planning to build a data centre somewhere in Dublin, with at least €600m pegged for the project.

Dubbed ‘Project G’, construction of the data centre is expected to begin this year and it will take 18 months to complete.

An estimated 400 construction jobs are likely to be created.

Dublin: Data centre capital of Europe

Amazon already has a considerable data centre footprint around Dublin and the new project will bring the number of Amazon data centres – including sites in Tallaght and Clonshaugh – to 10.

The new data centre in Mulhuddart will neighbour the €200m data centre being built by Facebook in Clonee, Co Meath, as well as the data centre facilities owned by Equinix in the Blanchardstown area.

Amazon employs 1,400 people in Dublin and 800 in Cork.

Last year, Amazon also revealed plans to rent a massive office block in Dublin and create 500 new jobs.

The addition of the new Amazon data centre campus will make Dublin one of the most concentrated data centre locations in Europe, with up to 30 data centres around the city belonging to Google, Microsoft, Facebook, IBM, Vodafone, Equinix, Interxion, Digital Realty Trust and many more, all doing their part to keep the internet alive.

Updated, 9.40am, 10 March 2017: This article was updated to amend incorrect references to the value of the centre as $1bn instead of €1bn.

John Kennedy is a journalist who served as editor of Silicon Republic for 17 years

editorial@siliconrepublic.com