Amazon to Add Another Bit of Ireland to Data Center Portfolio

After the recent four-hour Amazon Web Services (AWS) outage Amazon probably wouldn’t mind some “luck of the Irish” now that it has plans to build a $213 million data center campus in Dublin.

And, it might give the Irish a little more to celebrate on St. Patrick’s Day this Friday, with the company saying that it expects 400 workers to be onsite during peak construction.

In reality, luck of course has nothing to do with Amazon’s choice to add a 223,000-square foot facility to a data center portfolio already closely tied to Ireland. Analysts estimate that the company has invested more than $1 billion in Irish operations since 2004, with multiple data centers in Blanchardstown, Clonshaugh, and Tallaght. Amazon is also building a data center next to Dublin Airport.

See also: N. Virginia Landgrab Continues: Next Amazon Data Center Campus?

These data centers serve two purposes for the company: They host web retail services, while AWS uses them to offer data hosting to business customers globally. AWS alone created over $11 billion of revenue for the company in 2016, according to CloudPro.

The company says it expects the data center, codenamed “Project G”, to take about 18 months to complete with groundbreaking starting this year. Amazon recently asked permission from the Fingal County Council to build it. With an answer still to come, the Amazon camp certainly hopes it won’t run into a roadblock like Apple did last year.

Amazon also said seven, smaller data centers on the 64-acre, IDA-owned site might be in the works as it looks to convert the space into a data-storage facility campus. IDA Ireland oversees foreign business interests in the country.

Often called the "Data Center Capital of Europe," Dublin is a draw for many of technology’s behemoths: Google, Microsoft, Apple, and Facebook all have data centers there.