Google is investing a further €1 billion in the Netherlands, building a new data centre in Agriport and expanding its Eemshaven site. The new data centre will employ 125 people when operational. The company did not share details on the data centre’s specifications.
The decision brings Google’s total data centre investment in the Netherlands to €2.5 billion, and is the second expansion of the Eemshaven site; the company also invested €500 in March 2018. It is the first time the company has built two data centres on separate sites in the same European country. (It has five European data centres).
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VP Google Global Data Centers, Joe Kava, said: ‘The Netherlands is a digital frontrunner… [It] has first-class digital infrastructure, ample sustainable energy sources and qualified staff available. Equally important is the support of the local community.”
The company noted that in the Netherlands, Google has a total of four PPAs (power purchase agreements) generating roughly 130 MW of power; underpinning its commitment to 100 percent clean energy. (The company has matched energy consumption at its facilities with a 1:1 renewable energy purchase since 2017).
The Netherlands’ “Invest in Holland” quango notes that the country’s “mild climate and robust renewable energy cluster provide sustainable and affordable options for data center energy efficiency needs—from power production to cooling.”
Approximately one third of all European data centers are located in the Amsterdam area. The country claims the continent’s fastest connection speeds.
Google currently operates hyper-scale data centres in five European regions: St. Ghislain-Mons in Belgium, Hamina-Kotka in Finland, Dublin in Ireland, Fredericia in Denmark and Eemshaven-Groningen in the Netherlands.
The decision comes amid an “arms race” to provide data centre capacity to hyperscale cloud providers, with little sign of the market slowing. Companies like AWS and Azure procuring a whopping 100MW of co-location data centre capacity in Frankfurt, London, Amsterdam and Paris alone in the past 12 months alone, according to CBRE.
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