In an effort to meet the region’s rising demand for internet services, Google announced on Thursday that it will invest $1 billion to build a data centre just outside of London. This is the US tech giant’s latest investment in Britain.
Data centre of $1 Billion
The data centre will be situated in the town of Waltham Cross, roughly 15 miles north of central London, on a 33-acre (13-hectare) site that Google purchased in 2020, according to a statement from the Alphabet-owned business.
The British government, which is pushing for investment by businesses to help fund new infrastructure, particularly in growth industries like technology and artificial intelligence, described Google’s investment as a “huge vote of confidence” in the UK.
“Google’s $1 billion investment is testament to the fact that the UK is a centre of excellence in technology and has huge potential for growth,” Prime Minister Rishi Sunak said in the Google statement.
The investment comes after Google spent $1 billion buying a building near Covent Garden in central London in 2022, as well as another site in King’s Cross, where it is developing a new office and also has its AI company DeepMind located.
Additionally, it comes just weeks after Microsoft announced plans to invest 2.5 billion pounds ($3.2 billion) in Britain over the course of three years, including expanding the capacity of its data centres to support AI services in the future.
“This new data centre will help meet growing demand for our AI and cloud services and bring crucial compute capacity to businesses across the UK while creating construction and technical jobs,” Alphabet Chief Financial Officer Ruth Porat said in the statement.
Google, which has more than 7,000 employees in the UK, added that the waste heat from the data centre presents a chance for energy conservation that will help the neighbourhood.
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