Google to build server farm near Groningen

Later this year Google will built a huge server farm in Eemshaven, near Groningen in the north of the Netherlands. The new ‘Telehouse’ will have room for 100,000 servers that Google uses for storing its search data. Google is estimated to have some 450,000 servers around the world, in places like Mountain View (California), Virginia, Atlanta, Georgia and Dublin (Ireland). The cluster of computers will require an amount of energy enough to sustain 80,000 households.

Google’s reason for picking Eemshaven is all about power: the location is less than a kilometer away from the Eemscentrale power plant, energy suppliers Nuon and RWE are planning to build additional power plants close-by, and a nearby wind farm is to be expanded. All this energy is necessary for cooling the thousands of computer processors.

In addition Eemshaven is the location where a transatlantic fiber optic cable comes ashore.

Source: Google wil energie; Eemshaven heeft het (Dutch)

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 7th, 2007 at 8:36 am CET and is filed under Science & technology, Websites & Tools with tags google, groningen, internet, netherlands. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.