Google has shed more light on the planned expansion of its datacenter in Lithia Springs, Georgia.
Details of the scale of the increase have emerged in a regional impact document that the company filed with the state on July 9. The document, obtained by the Atlanta Business Chronicle, reveals that Google is planning a four-story facility covering an area of 808,355-square feet (75,000 square metres), under a project codenamed Woodside.
Google already has a 500,000-square-foot datacenter in Lithia Springs. It was announced in June the facility would receive a $300m investment to expand its capabilities. The company said it intended to begin construction of the new facility in the summer and complete the project by the end of 2016.
As ZDNet’s David Chernicoff noted in June, Douglas County sweetened the deal for Google by offering additional tax incentives if Google committed to the $300m investment. The expansion project will create 25 new jobs.
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The Atlanta Business Chronicle speculates that the additional datacentre capacity could be needed to support the company’s plans to deliver Google Fiber, its gigabit-speed internet service, to nine metro Atlanta cities as well as Charlotte and Raleigh-Durham, NC, and Nashville, TN. However, it hasn’t said exactly when these locations will come online.
The company has been investing in multiple datacentre expansion projects of late, includingthe launch of a new facility in Alabama, which marks its 14th site globally. Other recently expanded facilities include those located in Iowa, Georgia, Singapore, and Belgium.
For the Alabama datacentre, Google selected an old coal power plant earmarked for closure. Its plan is to repurpose the plant’s electrical transmission lines to bring in renewable energy under an arrangement with the local electric utility, the Tennessee Valley Authority.
In similar style, Google built its Finnish datacentre on an old paper mill in Hamina that now uses seawater to cool servers.
Apple has also converted disused buildings into datacentre space. The company earlier this year announced it would invest $2bn over 10 years to open a new data centre at a failed plant in Arizona that was to build sapphire glass.
Date: July 14, 2015