E-commerce giant Amazon, which has also emerged as a key player in the fast-growing, on-demand cloud computing business, is investing in a major data centre expansion in Dublin. It has acquired a former Tesco storage facility in Dublin 24.
Amazon has bought a 22,539 sq-metre facility at Greenhills Industrial Estate in Dublin 24.
The company plans to convert the former warehouse into a cutting-edge cloud computing data centre.
The company has also leased space for a data centre expansion in the Snugborough Industrial Estate in Ballycoolin and the Clonshaugh Industrial Estate. Amazon, which employs 450 people at a multilingual customer support centre in Cork, in 2006 signed a 10-year lease with Digital Realty Trust, which owns both data centres.
Hot web property
Amazon Web Services opened in Dublin in December 2008 to house European zones for its cloud computing services.
According to reports, agents for Tesco had been quoting a €7.5m price tag for the property, which is based on 13 acres.
Amazon has also taken a 10-year lease on the former Modus Media building in Clonshaugh Industrial Estate.
According to research by Netcraft, Amazon’s cloud hosting now makes up more than a third of all internet-facing web servers in Ireland, with three times more web servers hosted than the next-largest hosting location.
A hardware fault, rather than an attack by hacker group Anonymous, was blamed for a brief outage on Amazon’s servers in December which affected shoppers in the UK, France, Germany, Austria and Italy.
