Facebook is building its first Irish datacentre

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has taken to his social network to announce that its first Irish data centre has begun construction at its designated site in Clonee, Co Meath.

Facebook is setting up a data center in Clonee, Ireland, which will be its sixth in the world and its second outside the U.S.

About 2,000 people will be employed during the different construction phases, and dozens of people will be employed at the facility on a permanent basis when it opens in 2018.

“Clonee, County Meath, will be the site for our newest data center”.

Facebook’s first non-U.S. data center was opened in 2013 in Lulea, Sweden. When that facility went live, Facebook stressed how it would be able to run it on 100 percent renewable energy and use “the chilly Nordic air” to cool it. The data centre will become part of the infrastructure enabling billions of people to connect on the social networking platform, Messenger, Instagram and more.

Also Facebook has used Ireland as its own worldwide headquarter since 2009.

Commenting on the launch of the new Irish centre, Zuckerberg said: “Clonee Data Center will be one of the most advanced and energy efficient data centers in the world”.

The base in Ireland’s Clonee village, just outside of Dublin, will contain racks and servers that have been built from scratch as part of the Open Compute Project, an industry-wide group to create energy-efficient infrastructure and share it as open source. It had been speculated that Facebook’s next data center would be built in Asia, but considering that Europe brings in twice the revenue of Asia, it makes sense that the company would continue to invest there.