Google to invest $140mn to expand LatAm data center

Google will invest around $140 million to expand its data center in Chile, the company's only infrastructure of its kind in Latin America, which houses the information of millions of its users, the tech giant announced on Wednesday.

The complex, built in the Santiago suburb of Quilicura, is part of a group of 15 data centers that store and transmit information generated by applications like Gmail, Google Maps, YouTube, Waze and Uber, Efe reported.

During an event in the Chilean capital, attended by President Sebastian Piñera, Google announced that it will triple the data center's capacity, hiring around 1,000 people for the construction.

"With this investment, we are preparing for the future. We seek to improve the data center with this development, because our users will demand more and more information," said Edgardo Frias, country manager of Google Chile.

The company confirmed that only a handful of employees will have access to the server room - the highly-secured heart of the complex.

The expansion comes six years after Google announced the creation of the data center with an initial investment of $150 million.

"This expansion will mean improving our users' experience. We seek to make technology more accessible and easier to use," Frias said.

The complex runs on renewable energy coming from El Romero solar plant, located in northern Chile's Atacama Desert.

--IANS

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