Facebook is expanding its physical footprint in Europe with its second data center. This one will be located just northeast of Dublin in Clonee, County Meath, Ireland.
In a blog post announcing the new site on Sunday, Facebook vice president of infrastructure Tom Furlong said that the facility “will become part of the infrastructure that enables billions of people to connect with the people and things they care about on Facebook, Messenger, Instagram and more.”
The social network’s first data center in Europe is located on the edge of the Arctic Circle in Luleå, Sweden. The facility—surrounded by a fence to keep out moose—opened in June 2013. It was the company’s first outside the U.S.
Facebook says its new Clonee location will be “one of the most advanced, efficient and sustainable data centers in the world.” Its racks, servers, and other components “have been designed and built from scratch as part of the Open Compute Project, an industry-wide coalition of companies dedicated to creating energy- and cost-efficient infrastructure solutions and sharing them as open source.”
Facebook, whose international headquarters are in Ireland, selected Clonee as its next data center site, in part, because of the country’s robust wind resources. The company’s goal is to power 50% of its infrastructure with “clean and renewable energy” by the end of 2018. The new facility will run 100% on renewable energy.