Facebook builds a huge data center in Ireland

Clonee, Ireland will serve as the location of Facebook's 6th data center worldwide.

Facebook has officially announced plans to build a second data center in Europe based in Clonee, Ireland. The city near Dublin capital will serve as the site for Facebook's 6th data center worldwide. Construction will be conducted soon and will be operational in late 2017 and early 2018.

Previously, Facebook's first data center in Europe was opened in Luela, Sweden in 2013. Facebook said it was one of the most energy efficient data centers and all of them. Inside machines are all powered by hydropower. This is a clean energy source capable of 100% regeneration.

Facebook has officially announced plans to build a second data center in Europe based in Clonee, Ireland.

Besides, Facebook also takes advantage of the cool climate of Lulea region to cool thousands of servers inside the factory.

The excess heat will be used to warm the office here.

Similar to the new data center in Ireland, Facebook also uses only renewable energy.

For cooling, Clonee will use the same system as the center located in Sweden and elsewhere. However, due to the high amount of salt in the air, the system at Clonee will have to be filtered more thoroughly before being used.

Moreover, the company also said the new location will be fully operated by hardware and software from their Open Compute project.

"Clonee will be equipped with the best technologies that make it one of the most advanced, efficient and sustainable data centers in the world," said Tom Furlong, Facebook's vice president. "All server and transmission rack are designed and built in part of the Open Compute project - a commitment to free and open source software between many companies."

With the move to place a new data center in Ireland, Facebook is the next name to join the growing list of companies operating at least one data center in this country, including Amazon, Google, Microsoft and the next is Apple. Facebook has also taken Ireland as its international headquarters since 2009.

Reportedly, Facebook has been targeting Clonee since June last year but today it has just made an official decision.