Google yesterday announced its new Alabama DC and coverage is significant with 198 posts.
Google has been expanding capacity in LATAM, EU, and APAC for years since it has made a land purchase in the US. When you look at the location of the Jackson County Alabama DC in the middle of the cluster of 5 existing facilities I would place bets that Google could build more at this one site than any other. How big? The Alabama site originally had 8 coal fired units. The last one produced 460MW. Times 8 that is almost 4GW of power transmission infrastructure and water to cool down the plant.
The official Google post is here. http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2015/06/a-power-plant-for-internet-our-newest.html
What is not in the Google post are some quotes from Google's Urs Hoelzle and Joe Kava which the NYTimes covered. http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/06/24/google-to-open-new-data-center-in-alabama/
Urs says...
““Data centers are attractive customers” to power suppliers, said Urs Hölzle, Google’s senior vice president for technical infrastructure. In turn, he said, “bringing in alternative power was important to us.”
“In the next 12 months, we will look at plausible projects,” he said. While wind power appears to be the furthest along in producing energy cheaply, he noted that Google had already done a solar energy project in South Africa.”
Joe says
““We are looking to do a similar type of approach as Finland” in Alabama, said Joe Kava, who leads data center construction at Google. Like many Google sites, he said, Alabama will be “a campus model with multiple buildings.”
Google appears to be on something of a construction binge, with data center expansions in the United States, Singapore, and Belgium just over the last few months. This may be partly because of demand, and partly to risk management on Google’s part. By having several construction projects underway, Mr. Kava said, the chances of a shortfall in overall capacity from a slowdown at one project were minimized.”
The Alabama site could be the biggest Google data center location until they buy a bigger one.
