Facebook to open its first data centre in Ireland

Clonee, County Meath will be the site for the company's newest data center

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Facebook will construct a data centre facility at Ireland's Clonee village that will become part of the infrastructure that enables billions of people connect on the social networking platform, Messenger, Instagram and more, the social networking giant announced on Sunday.

"Clonee, County Meath, will be the site for our newest data center. The Clonee data center will be our first in Ireland and follows Lulea, in Sweden, as our second in Europe," Tom Furlong, vice president (infrastructure), wrote in a post.

The 227-acre site will be packed full of cutting-edge technology, making it one of the most advanced, efficient and sustainable data centres 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," Furlong informed.

The Clonee data centre will be powered by 100% renewable energy thanks to Ireland's robust wind resources.

"This will help us reach our goal of powering 50% of our infrastructure with clean and renewable energy by the end of 2018," the blog post read.

Ireland has been Facebook's international headquarters since 2009.

This will be Facebook's sixth data centre facility. Other sites include Altoona, Iowa; Forest City, North Carolina; Lulea, Sweden; and the original one in Prineville, Oregon.

Facebook has confirmed that it would be building another data centre in Fort Worth, Texas.