Dublin installs 1GW sub-station to support doubling data centre growth
A new one gigawatt electricity substation has been installed in Dublin in a bid to help the city keep pace with the growth in the number of data centres.
Back in 2017, the fast growth of Dublin’s data center industry was highlighted by the ESB as a “principal risk” to the organization, with demand expected to more than double in a short space of time, based on filed data center planning applications.
Indeed, Dublin has become one of Europe’s primary data centre hubs, partly as a result of the choice of US multinationals to site their European Union headquarters in Ireland. Over the past year, data center growth has also been fueled by the rise in working from home, supported by tools such as Slack, Microsoft Teams, Zoom, and other remote collaboration tools.
In addition to installing substations to support the rapid growth of the data centre industry across the world, increased competition in the power market has seen links and inter-connectors installed connecting disparate markets, most recently between Germany and Norway with the NordLink project.
AWS Dublin data centre to contribute to new district heating scheme
Amazon Web Services' recently completed data centre in Dublin is to supply recycled heat to Heatworks, South Dublin District Council’s (SDDC) newly established district heating company.
The scheme will begin supplying heat before the end of next year, providing heat to 47,000 square meters of public-sector buildings, 3,000 square meters of commercial office space, and 135 ‘affordable’ apartments by 2024. Buildings that will benefit include SDDC’s County Hall, the Civic Centre, the Technological University Dublin, and Tallaght County Library.
The heat from AWS’s data center will be drawn from its hot aisle and run through a heat exchanger that both cools the data center and heats up water that is delivered to a nearby heat pump, operated by Heatworks.
While district heating schemes are not widely deployed across the world, they have proved popular in parts of Scandinavia (excluding Norway), Germany and Austria.
Cologix starts building one million square foot data centre campus in Ashburn, N. Virginia
Wholesale colocation, cloud, and interconnection service provider Cologix have broken ground on what will be a million square foot (92,903 square meter) campus in the world’s most popular location for data centre operators: Ashburn (Northern Virginia).
Once completed, the site will comprise 16 data centre halls, but in its first phase it will provide six halls, up to 350,000 square feet (32,516 square meters) of total space and a maximum capacity of 32MW.
Having bought the site in 2018, the company had been biding its time before converting the site, saying it would mark the beginning of a “major shift” in strategy from building and operating regional data centers mostly destined for interconnection to hyperscale facilities.
The location of the campus is no accident, either, as the value of being in the densest data center region in the world has continued to increase: with land selling for more than $2 million an acre. According to CBRE, the area accounted for more than 70 percent of all take-up across primary markets in the first part of 2020.
Cologix now operates 34 data centers across the USA and Canada, but has no plans to stop there: last year, the company sought and secured a $500 million investment to further fuel its expansion, which will include another data center in the Infomart building in Dallas, as well as the new campus in Ashburn.
AirTrunk opens Singapore and Hong Kong data centres
Announced last week, these are the first AirTrunk data centres to go live outside Australia, where the independent data canter provider has three hyperscale facilities.
When fully built-out, SGP1 and HK1 will offer a total of 80MW combined. A sixth hyperscale campus in Tokyo (Japan) is currently under construction.
Earlier this year, Macquarie Infrastructure and Real Asset led a consortium that acquired a majority stake of 88 percent in AirTrunk that values the latter at more than AU$3bn (US$1.8bn).
