Facebook is building its first Irish datacentre

Facebook has confirmed it will open its first datacentre in Ireland, which it claims will be among the most “sustainable datacentres in the world.”

The €200 million site will be based in Clonee, County Meath, and will be entirely powered by renewable energy, the social network firm said. It will be the company's second site in Europe, the first being located in Luleå, Sweden.

Ireland’s scores of wind farms will supply its energy needs, and Facebook said this will help it reach its goal of powering 50 per cent of its infrastructure with clean and renewable energy by the end of 2018.

The facility will house the infrastructure that enables billions of people to use the social networking site, as well as its satellite services, such as Facebook Messenger and Instagram.

In a statement about the new facility, Facebook VP for infrastructure, Tom Furlong, said: “Clonee will be packed full of cutting-edge technology, making it one of the most advanced, efficient and sustainable datacentres in the world.

“All the racks, servers, and other components have been designed and built from scratch as part of the Open Compute Project, an industry-wide coalition of companies dedicated to creating energy- and cost-efficient infrastructure solutions and sharing them as open source.”

Plans for Facebook’s €200 million data centre emerged last summer, when it first submitted building applications for the site.

This is not the first time Facebook has built a datacentre powered by renewable energy, with its upcoming Texas datacentre to be powered entirely by wind energy.

This push for more energy efficient and greener data centres has been a central issue for environmental campaigners, some of whom put pressure on Amazon last year to up its reliance on green energies.