Company breaks ground in Tennessee and announces investment in Oklahoma as it reveals it employs up to 1,900 directly on its data centre campuses.
Google has launched a cloud assault on all the world’s top public cloud providers with the announcement of a combined investment of $6bn in data centres and energy infrastructure, following Apple’s $10bn data centre push unveiled last month.
The plans were unveiled by CEO Sundar Pichai while attending the ground-breaking ceremony of the company’s new data centre in Clarksville/Montgomery County, Tennessee.
He said: “The Tennessee data centre is part of a $2.5bn investment we are making to open or expand data centres in Alabama, Oregon, Tennessee, Virginia and Oklahoma.
“These data centres are what make Google services run for you or your business (in Tennessee alone, we answer millions of searches a day, and about 18,000 businesses and non-profits use our search and advertising tools).”
Tennessee Senator Bob Corker,said: “The launch of Google’s data centre in Clarksville is great news for Montgomery County. These high-quality jobs will benefit families in a real way, and I applaud Google’s mission to improve education and advance workforce development for Americans.”
Of the $2.5bn CAPEX, $600m alone are to be invested into Google’s campus at the Mid-America Industrial Park near Pryor, Oklahoma, brining the company’s investment in the state to $2.5bn.
Google has also recently announced new data centre builds in Japan and work has started on a potential new data centre campus in Sweden.
Pichai said: “Our data centres also have a strong impact on the economies around them. People often discuss “the cloud” as if it is built out of air. But it’s actually made up of buildings, machinery, and people who construct and manage it all.
“Today we employ an estimated 1,900 people directly on our data centre campuses. We have created thousands of construction jobs—both for our data centres themselves, and for renewable energy generation.”
With that, Pichai took on the opportunity to lay down the cloud giant’s renewable energy purchasing commitments to date which will result in energy infrastructure investments of more than $3.5bn globally, “about two-thirds of that in the United States”.
He added: “In addition to these five data centres, we are investing in new or expanded offices in nine states: California, Colorado, Illinois, Massachusetts, Michigan, New York, Pennsylvania, Texas and Washington.
“Having talented people from different places, bringing diverse perspectives and backgrounds to work, is essential to the development of our products. In these locations, there will be jobs for thousands of people in a variety of roles—engineering, operations, sales and more.”
