Facebook Marks Out New European Location

Rendering of the Clonee data center

Clonee, Ireland— Facebook has recently announced that the village of Clonee in County Meath, Ireland, will be the home of the social media giant’s newest data center, its sixth data center overall. Ireland has been Facebook’s international headquarters since 2009 but the Clonee facility will be Facebook’s first data center in Ireland, and their second in Europe following Luleå in Sweden, which opened in 2013.

The facility will become part of the infrastructure behind networks like Facebook, Messenger, Instagram and more. Clonee will feature the latest technology, making it one of the most advanced, efficient and sustainable data centers in the world, Tom Furlong, Facebook’s vice president for site operations, wrote ina blog post.

He also wrote, according to VentureBeat, that this data center should be handling web traffic and Facebook’s own computing needs by late 2017 or early 2018. VentureBeat also reported that Facebook will be purchasing the site for $1 billion.

All the racks, servers, and other components have been designed and built from scratch as part of the Open Compute Project, an industry-wide coalition of companies dedicated to creating energy- and cost-efficient infrastructure solutions and sharing them as open source. In addition, the data center will be powered by 100 percent renewable energy, thanks to Ireland’s robust wind resources. This will help the company reach their goal of powering 50 percent of their infrastructure with clean and renewable energy by the end of 2018.

Image courtesy of Facebook