Microsoft expands vast Dublin datacentre

Microsoft is ploughing $130m (£82m) into its huge Dublin datacentre in response to European demand for the company's technology services, it said.

The investment will add a further 112,000 square feet of space to the existing 300,000-square foot facility, Stephen McGibbon, Microsoft chief technology officer in EMEA, said on Thursday.

"This build is to meet projected capacity," McGibbon told ZDNet UK.

The facility, Microsoft's first major datacentre outside the US, opened in 2009. With the expansion, it is adding 13MW of power to the existing 16MW.

Microsoft's datacentres are operated by its Global Foundation Services infrastructure team, which maintains the facilities to provide IT resources for services such as Bing, Xbox Live, Office 365 and Windows Live.

Though the early phase of the Dublin facility used Microsoft's ITPAC modular datacentre design, the new build will use another method, McGibbon said, but could not give more details.

McGibbon also could not say which services drove demand for the new build, how many IT jobs it would add, which utility provider the company is using, nor how long it took the company to provision the extra power.