Over €200 million to be invested in development of Cork data centres

Over €200 million is to be invested into the development of a number of data centres on the outskirts of Cork city.

JCD Group, one of Ireland’s commercial property companies plan to build the data centres as part of the redevelopment of the former Mitsui Denman site in Little Island, Cork.

Planning permission is due in a number of weeks to transform the 32 acre site into a technology campus with over 275,000 sq ft of state of the art data centre accommodation.

The development, which will create 150 new jobs in Cork to support the data centres and will also lead to hundreds of additional construction jobs during the build phase.

The developers have access to a 60MW electrical grid connection to the adjoining substation in Little Island, for delivery in 2017 which provides enough power to support the proposed data centres while maintaining additional capacity to support future expansion. It is one of the few locations in Europe with access to this scale of electrical connection in this time frame.

Cork has been boosted from a connectivity perspective as a result of Hibernia Network’s landing its newest transatlantic cable there last year which means Cork now offers the lowest latency in the EU to the east coast of the US.

Dublin has been the location of choice for US multinationals looking to build large-scale data centres, with major investments undertaken since 2008 by IBM, Microsoft, Google and Amazon, involving investment of over €2 billion to date.

Construction

Apple and Facebook recently announced their plans for the construction of Hyper scale data centres in Galway and Meath.

CEO of Cork Chamber of Commerce Conor Healy welcomed the planned investment and said the delivery of Tier-I international connectivity to Cork by Hibernia Networks has been a priority focus area for the Chamber in recent years.

“We are delighted that this key piece of catalytic infrastructure has enabled planned developments such as this, which will add a vital new resource to our already strong enterprise-base while also opening the region up to new sectors operating in cloud based technologies.

“Cork’s infrastructure will be significantly enhanced as a result of this planned development and will position this region in particular to grow the ICT, financial services and digital sectors for years to come.”