Google plan new Belgian data centre with on-site solar farm
Google has announced plans to build a data centre in Belgium that will have an on-site solar farm for energy generation. The search giant has set aside €250 million ($312 million) for the construction of the facility, which is being built in a town called Saint-Ghislain located about an hour-and-a-half's drive from the capital Brussels.
Google expects the data centre to come online in mid-2019. The attached solar farm is already up and running thanks to the fact that construction begun back in March 2017. It consists of 10,665 solar panels spread over about 10 acres that are set to generate 2.9 Gigawatt hours of energy per year. Google say this makes the facility the second largest in the region.
Other tech giants are investing in green energy too. In October, Microsoft Corp. signed an agreement to buy all the electricity from an Irish wind farm operated by General Electric Co. to power one of its local cloud data centres.
As for the new Belgian data centre, it's the third that Google is building in the country. Google says that the project will bring its total investment in Belgium to €1 billion ($1.25 billion.)
