UPDATED 12:26 EDT / FEBRUARY 02 2018

INFRA

Google is investing $310M in a new Belgian data center with an on-site solar farm

Google LLC’s global facilities have been running exclusively on renewable energy since late last year thanks to a series of major energy purchases that the company started back in 2010. The search giant is determined to maintain this newly earned status.

On Thursday, Google announced plans to build a data center in Belgium that will have an on-site solar farm for energy generation. The search giant has set aside €250 million ($312 million) for the construction of the facility, which is being built in a town called Saint-Ghislain located about an hour-and-a-half’s drive from the capital Brussels.

Google expects the data center to come online in mid-2019. The attached solar farm is already up and running thanks to the fact that construction begun back in March 2017. It consists of 10,665 solar panels spread over about 10 acres that are set to generate 2.9 Gigawatt hours of energy per year. In more practical terms, Google said, this makes the facility the second largest in the region.

Other tech giants are investing in green energy too. In October, Microsoft Corp. signed an agreement to buy all the electricity from an Irish wind farm operated by General Electric Co. to power one of its local cloud data centers. In the same month, Amazon.com Inc. Chief Executive Officer Jeff Bezos climbed atop a 300-foot-tall turbine in Scurry County, Texas, to christen an even bigger wind farm commissioned by the retail giant.

The cloud industry’s construction efforts extend underwater as well. Two weeks ago, Google announced an initiative to build three new submarine communications cables at a cost of several hundred million dollars along with five cloud data centers. The facilities are expected to become operational later this year.

As for the new Belgian data center, it’s the third that Google is building in the country. Google says that the project will bring its total investment in Belgium to €1 billion ($1.25 billion.)

Image: Unsplash

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