Google said it will build its next European data center in western Denmark. The Alphabet subsidiary expects to invest €600 million to build the facility outside of a town called Fredericia, Joe Kava, Google’s global VP of data centers, wrote in a blog post published Tuesday.
The company has accelerated data center construction around the world in recent years to support its big expansion into the cloud infrastructure services business, dominated by Amazon Web Services and to a lesser degree Microsoft Azure. Each of the three companies have been pouring billions into new cloud data centers nearly every quarter as they fight for market share.
Google spent close to $5.6 billion on “production equipment, data center construction, and facilities” in the third quarter, Alphabet CFO Ruth Porat said on an earnings call last month – up from $3.6 billion it spent on the same things during this period last year.
About a year ago, the company acquired another plot of land in Denmark, in Aabenraa, adjacent to an Apple data center construction site, Reuters reported. A Google spokesperson told the news service at the time that the company didn't have specific plans for the 324-acre property, buying it in case it would need additional data center capacity in Europe.
Facebook is also building a data center in Denmark.
Denmark and other Nordic countries have been attractive for massive data center builds because of abundant renewable energy, cool climate, good network infrastructure, and public officials' eagerness to attract this type of facilities.
The future Fredericia facility will be the fifth data center Google will have built for itself in Europe, the others being in Dublin, Ireland; Hamina, Finland; St. Ghislain, Belgium; and Eemshaven, Netherlands. The company also lists cloud availability regions hosted in data centers in London and Frankfurt, which are likely in leased colocation facilities.
As it does with all its data center builds, Google said it will seek power purchase contracts with renewable energy suppliers to match the energy use of its Danish site.
The company expects the future data center to employ 150 to 250 people once it comes online, according to Kava. Construction is expected to run through 2021.
