Image: © Media Lens King/Stock.adobe.com
The new Apple facility in Cork – the first of its kind in Europe – will be responsible for testing and analysing products.
Apple is opening a new multimillion-euro engineering and test facility in its Cork campus.
The state-of the-art facility will be used to test and analyse Apple products for the whole of Europe. A team of highly skilled engineers and technicians will be equipped with high-tech equipment such as CT scanners and electron microscopes to ensure product quality.
Hollyhill in Cork is home to Apple’s European headquarters.
The new facility is the result of a renovation of an old warehouse, with one of the world’s most valuable companies investing “tens of millions of euros” and employing around 300 construction workers, mostly local.
‘First of its kind in Europe’
While the original structure of the warehouse has been kept intact, Apple said that the interiors have been completely transformed to create what it described as a facility that is the “first of its kind in Europe”.
“Apple is continually looking at ways to improve its products for customers,” the company said in a statement.
“The opening of this new facility demonstrates Apple’s ongoing investment in advancing skills and capabilities in Cork, adding new roles and enhanced facilities across several business units and teams.”
As well as this investment in the new engineering and test facility, Apple also noted the “exceptional growth” of its artificial intelligence and machine learning team, which was first set up in Cork in late 2019 and has now grown to a team of more than 680 people.
Apple’s history in Ireland is tied strongly to its operations in Cork, where it first opened a manufacturing facility in 1980 and employed 60 people. Today, more than four decades later, Apple employs more than 6,000 people in Cork.
As tech companies make their way back to offices, the Irish Independent reported earlier this month that Apple is to require employees to be back on site at least two days a week by the end of this month and three days a week in May.
10 things you need to know direct to your inbox every weekday. Sign up for the Daily Brief, Silicon Republic’s digest of essential sci-tech news.
