Microsoft to turn on Chicago, Dublin datacenters in July

Microsoft has been building out its datacenter network for the past few years. In July, the company plans to bring its Chicago and Dublin, Ireland, datacenters online.

In January of this year, Microsoft reportedly was scaling back on its Chicago facility, as part of its overall cost-cutting moves. But according to a June 29 post to the ms datacenters blog, the Chicago facility will go live on July 20 and Dublin on July 1.

Dublin is the first of Microsoft's "mega data center" to be built outside of the United States, according to the company. Microsoft will be hosting its various Microsoft-hosted Online, Windows Live, Bing and Azure cloud services in these facilities, officials said.

Microsoft's Chicago datacenter covers over 700,000 square feet — "approximately the size of 16 football fields" — with critical power of 60 megawatts, the blog posting said. The Dublin datacenter covers 303,000 square feet, with 5.4 mega watts of critical power available now and up to 22.2 mega watts of critical power available in the future.