Facebook is building a second European data center
An illustration of the new Facebook data center.
Facebook is building its second European data center, in Ireland.
The company said the Clonee data center, in County Meath, will follow its Luleå data center in Sweden, which came online in 2013.
Tom Furlong, Facebook's VP of infrastructure, said the new Irish data center will be one of the most efficient and sustainable data centers in the world as all the racks, servers, and other components have been designed and built from scratch as part of the Open Compute Project, a Facebook-led coalition of companies which aims to create highly efficient data center hardware which it shares as open source.
Furlong said the data center in Clonee will be powered by 100 percent renewable energy "thanks to Ireland's robust wind resources": the Luleå site runs on hydroelectric power while some of its other data centers are also wind-powered.
Facebook has a goal of powering 50 percent of its infrastructure with clean and renewable energy by the end of 2018. Ireland has been home to Facebook's international headquarters since 2009.
Facebook started building its own data centers back in 2010, with a site in Prineville, Oregon, and since then has added facilities in Altoona, Iowa: Forest City, North Carolina; and Luleå. In July last year Facebook said it was building its fifth data center in Fort Worth, Texas.
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