Cork Lined Up For ‘Game Changing’ £150m Data Centre

A new £150 million (€200m) data centre development is planned for Cork, Ireland, with the developers expecting the build to come online in mid-2017.

Commercial property company JCD Group is behind the project and is awaiting planning permission to build the 32-acre site, which it describes as a “game changer” for Cork’s investment landscape.

The data centre site will create 150 jobs, according to JCD Group, and is a response to increased demand for data centre services in the region.

Negotiations

A spokesperson for JCD said that the company is currently in negotiations with a number of customers as well as co-location operators, and that JCD is “very encouraged by the level of interest”.

“Subject to receiving satisfactory planning permission we intend commencing site works immediately with a view to delivering the first data centre by mid-2017,” the spokesperson said.

“Cork is now uniquely placed from a fibre perspective by being able to offer the lowest latency between the US and Europe. Furthermore, the availability of 60MW of power from the adjoining dual supplied Castleview substation will provide excellent power resilience and facilitates speed to market.”

JCD said that there has recently been a move away from the trend of multinationals building large data centres in Dublin. Since 2008 IBM, Microsoft, Google, and Amazon have pumped more than £1 billion into data centre projects around the city.

But more recently, Apple and Facebook revealed their plans for data centres in Galway and Meath, with JCD pinning the cause of the shift on power constraints in the Dublin area.

However, those multinationals are currently facing strong opposition to the develoment of those data centres from local residents, who are concerned about the impact the builds could have on the surrounding environment.

Grid

The developers in Cork have access to a 60MW electrical grid connection to the adjoining substation, ready for delivery in 2017. JCD said that this provides enough power to support the proposed data centres, while maintaining additional capacity to support future expansion.

“It is one of the few locations in Europe with access to this scale of electrical connection in this time frame,” said JCD.

JCD also applauded Hibernia Network’s landing of its latest transatlantic cable in Cork last September, claiming that the proposed data centre will be able to offer some of the lowest latency in the EU to the east coast of the US. The Hibernia Express Transatlantic Cable (HETC) is an ultra-low latency submarine cable, spanning 4,600km that links Halifax, Nova Scotia to Slough, England and Cork, Ireland.

Conor Healy, CEO of Cork Chamber, said: “The delivery of Tier-I international connectivity to Cork by Hibernia Networks has been a priority focus area for the Chamber in recent years and we are delighted that this key piece of catalytic infrastructure has enabled planned developments such as this, which will add a vital new resource to our already strong enterprise-base while also opening the region up to new sectors operating in cloud based technologies.”

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