Facebook today officially announced that it plans to open its second European data center in Clonee, Ireland. The town, which sits right outside of Dublin will play host to Facebook’s sixth data center overall. Construction will start soon and the new facility will go online sometime in late 2017 or early 2018.
Facebook’s first European data center opened in Luela, Sweden back in 2013. When that facility went live, Facebook stressed how it would be able to run it on 100 percent renewable energy and use “the chilly Nordic air” to cool it.
In Ireland, Facebook will also only use renewable energy to power the new data center.
As for cooling, Clonee will use a system that’s similar to the one Facebook currently uses in Sweden and other locations, but because there’s too much salt in the air, it’ll have to filter the air more thoroughly than in other places before it can be used inside the building.
In addition, the company also notes that the new location will be powered completely by hardware and software from its own Open Compute Project.
“Clonee will be packed full of cutting-edge technology, making it one of the most advanced, efficient, and sustainable data centers in the world,” Tom Furlong, Facebook’s VP for site operations, writes in today’s announcement. “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.”
By going to Ireland, Facebook is joining a growing list of other companies that operate at least some of their European data centers in the country, including Amazon, Google, Microsoft and (soon) Apple. Facebook has also used Ireland as its own international headquarter since 2009.
It’s worth noting that today’s announcement doesn’t come as a total surprise. Facebook already confirmed that it was looking at Clonee last June, but it didn’t make the decision official until today.