Software giant Microsoft has received planning permission from South Dublin County Council to build four huge data centres that could involve investment of €900m, create 140 permanent jobs and as many as 1,800 construction jobs.
It emerged late last year that Microsoft was embarking on a major $2bn data centre expansion in Ireland, the UK and the Netherlands.
Microsoft has already invested $800m in its European data centre in Dublin and this is understood to be the third of three phases of the centre’s construction.
‘By expanding our data centre regions in the UK, Netherlands and Ireland we aim to give local businesses and organisations of all sizes the transformative technology they need to seize new global growth’
– SATYA NADELLA, MICROSOFT
The new facility in Dublin will be the equivalent of three football fields, totalling approximately 150,000 sq ft.
The new data centre facilities will serve as cloud computing hubs for Microsoft’s European customers.
“By expanding our data centre regions in the UK, Netherlands and Ireland we aim to give local businesses and organisations of all sizes the transformative technology they need to seize new global growth,” Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said in November.
Dublin’s digital west
According to the Irish Independent, South Dublin County Council approved the project for the data centres, which will be built at Grange Castle in Clondalkin.
The data centres will be adjacent to other data centres built in the area by Google and Digital Realty Trust.
It is understood that the construction of the new data centres will create 1,800 construction jobs over three years.
The data centres will also result in 140 new full-time jobs to manage them.
Microsoft is also constructing a new €134m campus in Dublin, which will be operational by next year and will house the company’s entire 1,200 Dublin workforce for the firs time under one roof.
Microsoft first came to Ireland in 1985, initially to pack software into boxes and ship it worldwide. Within a decade, some of the earliest employees had become millionaires due to their stock options coinciding with Microsoft’s dominance of the PC market in the 1990s.
Today, Dublin is the epicentre of all of Microsoft’s international software activities from development to the cloud outside the US.
