Facebook has announced that it plans to build a 100% renewable energy powered data center in Ireland, its second in Europe.
Tom Furlong, the company’s Vice President of Infrastructure, announced the news via a blog post on the company’s Newsroom, revealing that the new data center would be built in Clonee, County Meath. It is the company’s sixth data center worldwide, and the second in Europe, following the Luleå data center completed in Sweden. Ireland is also the company’s international headquarters, and this new €200 million investment into the region is also intended to show Facebook’s commitment to Ireland and Europe.
The Clonee data center will join its brethren in tackling data usage around the world from Facebook, Messenger, Instagram, and other Facebook traffic. The data center is promised to be “packed full of cutting-edge technology,” and will be “one of the most advanced, efficient, and sustainable data centers in the world.” Said Tom Furlong: 
All the racks, servers, and other components have been designed and built from scratch as part of the Open Compute Project, an industry-wide coalition of companies dedicated to creating energy- and cost-efficient infrastructure solutions and sharing them as open source.
In addition to being built to be sustainable, the data center will be run from 100% renewable energy, thanks to Ireland’s wind industry. The Luleå data center in Sweden is also 100% powered by renewable energy, and in construction was able to minimize the number of backup generators needed onsite by 70%.
Facebook is aiming to power 50% of its infrastructure from clean and renewable energy by the end of 2018.
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