Amazon Plans To Open €1bn Dublin Data Centre With A Large Data Campus

Amazon is planning to open a €1 billion (£873m) data centre campus in west Dublin, fuelling the expansion of its cloud and web services.

The e-commerce giant has submitted plans to build a 20,739 square metre data centre in Mulhuddart near Dublin, according to the Irish Independent.

Dublin data centre

The data centre itself is set to cost a mere €200 million (£174m) with a a further €700 million (£611m) to build up to another seven smaller data centres to act as a data storage campus. This would likely act as a storage campus for data belonging to European customers, thereby enabling Amazon to operate within the European Union General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

Construction of the facility, which is reportedly codenamed Project G, is to begin this year and is scheduled to take around 18 months to complete and will employ 400 workers at its peak.

The facility will fall under the local governance of the Fingal County Council, which, if it grants Amazon chief executive Jeff Bezon permission to build the new data centre, will play host to ten data centres. This further adds credence that Dublin and its surrounding area appears to be the place to build data centres to serve Europe, likely due to it being the first major city encountered by US firms when they cross the Atlantic.

Amazon already has three data centres in the Dublin area, and keeps good company with the likes of Google, Facebook, Apple and Microsoft, who all have Ireland-based data centres and plan to build more in the nation.

The continued rapid growth of Amazon’s own web services and its cloud infrastructure-as-a-service for other web companies and enterprises means its data centre expansion comes as no real surprise. Even with competition from Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform, the overall insatiable appetite for cloud and web services, it is unlikely that Amazon or its rivals will see their cloud expansion slowdown any time soon.