Daisy Watts
Jan 19, 2024
Alphabet-owned Google on Thursday announced its decision to invest $1 billion in a data centre outside of London to meet the growing demand for internet services in the region.
The US tech giant, in a statement, said the data centre will be constructed on a a 33-acre (13-hectare) site in the town of Waltham Cross, about 15 north of central London, which was purchased in 2020.
It should be noted that the British government is also working to push for investment by businesses to help fund new infrastructure, particularly in growth industries like technology and artificial intelligence (AI); therefore it described Google’s investment as a “huge vote of confidence” in the UK.
"Google's $1 billion investment is a testament to the fact that the UK is a centre of excellence in technology and has huge growth potential," Prime Minister Rishi Sunak said in the Google statement.
The investment follows Google's $1 billion purchase of a central London office building in 2022, close to Covent Garden, and another site in nearby King's Cross, where it is building a new office and where its AI company DeepMind is also based.
"This new data centre will help meet the 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 employs over 7,000 people in Britain, also said that waste heat generated from the data centre would be an opportunity for energy conservation that can benefit the local community.
