Yesterday, Apple announced its plans to invest $921 million constructing a brand new data centre in Denmark. This comes in the wake of the company’s plans to build a similar data centre in Ireland becoming embroiled in a legal battle.
It will be Apple’s second data centre in Denmark which runs completely on renewable energy.
The company’s first data centre in the Nordic nation, which was announced at the same time as a data centre in Athenry, County Galway two years ago, is set to start operations before the end of the year.
However, construction of the Irish facility was halted because it is under legal review, an Apple spokesperson confirmed. The High Court will rule on the issue on 27th July 2017.
In January, Facebook also announced its intention to construct a data centre in Denmark. This will be the company’s third data centre outside the U.S.
Apple stated that the new data centre in Denmark will start operating during Q2, 2019. It will be located in Aabenraa, a city in the south of Denmark close to the border with Germany, and will support Apple’s online services such as Siri, Maps, iMessage, App Store and iTunes Store for clients throughout Europe.
Erik Stannow, Apple’s manager for the Nordic region, said: “We’re thrilled to be expanding our data centre operations in Denmark and investing in new sources of clean power.”
He added that the data centre planned for Aabenraa will run completely on renewable energy, thanks to the fact that they were adding new sources of clean energy. Denmark is a world leader in the field of wind power and has copious supplies of biomass energy as well as wind energy.
Stannow concluded by saying: “The reliability of the Danish grid is one of the main reasons we will operate two sites in Denmark.”