Google is reportedly planning to spend over 600 million euro (£471 million) over the next 4 years in building its own data centre in the northern Netherlands.
Francois Sterin, director of global infrastructure at Google, confirmed the report at a news conference held today in Eemshaven, located 133 miles northwest of Amsterdam, saying “We know this area well, there is available land and there is a favorable climate for us.”
The new data centre, which is set to begin operations in 2017, will be a 120-megawatt facility built around 44 hectares and will about 150 permanent staff, Google confirmed adding that it may invest further in the region as its growth continues. The construction work of the new data centre is scheduled to start in 2016 with 1,000 workers.
Google already has three large European data centres in Ireland, Finland and Belgium.
According to Henk Kamp, Dutch Minister of Economic Affairs, the Dutch government has been continuously making efforts to attract major IT giants to the industrial area. Not only Google, rivals Apple and Microsoft are also investing in Eemshaven, which is the landing point of a high-speed transatlantic fibre-optic cable linking Europe with the US.
While Apple is reportedly considered setting up a new data centre in the Eemshaven area, Microsoft is also building a large data facility in Middenmeer, in the province of Noord-Holland.
