Google LLC will spend $3.3 billion to build two new data centers in South Carolina and expand an existing cloud campus. 

The Alphabet Inc. detailed the project on Thursday. It’s the latest in a string of 10-figure data center investments that the company has announced since the start of the year. In the same time frame, Google committed to building several new subsea internet cables that will help process data traffic between its cloud facilities. 

The search giant built its first South Carolina data center campus in the state’s Berkeley County more than a decade ago. A few years later, it spent $600 million to expand the site by constructing a third cloud facility on the premises. The investment announced this week will see Google invest $1.3 billion to make further upgrades and bolster the site’s workforce, which currently comprises about 900 staffers.

The rest of the $3.3 billion investment will go toward two new data centers. They will be located in South Carolina’s Dorchester County, which is immediately adjacent to Berkeley County. Google expects the project to create 1,200 long-term construction jobs along with 200 operational positions.

Cloud providers are investing heavily to expand their artificial intelligence infrastructure. In April, Insider reported that Microsoft Corp. plans to equip its data centers with 1.8 million graphics cards by year’s end. Google didn’t specify what hardware will be installed in its South Carolina facilities, but it’s possible the company will use the opportunity to grow the number of AI chips it can offer to cloud customers.

Google’s data centers run not only Nvidia Corp. graphics cards but also internally developed AI accelerators. The company debuted Trillium, the latest addition to its line of custom machine learning chips, in May. The processor provides 4.7 times the peak performance of Google’s previous-generation silicon.

One contributor to Trillum’s speed is that the search giant doubled the amount of onboard HBM memory. Moving data to and from a chip’s onboard memory is faster than using external RAM, which boosts AI models’ performance. Google has also equipped the processor with a module optimized to speed up product recommendation algorithms. 

Google is rolling out Trillium to its data centers as part of AI clusters, or pods, that each contain up to 256 chips. Those pods also include another custom processor called Titanium. The latter chip can offload certain cybersecurity and networking tasks from an AI cluster’s main processors, which leaves more compute capacity for customer workloads.

Google’s investment in South Carolina comes about four months after its previous data center expansion initiative. In May, the company announced plans to upgrade its Hamina, Finland, cloud facility at a cost of €1 billion. A few weeks earlier, Google committed $2 billion to a new data center campus in Indiana.

Photo: Google