Google invests £788m in expanding data centre as AI demand soars
Despite serving the world wide web, Google has reinforced its commitment to the UK by building a new data centre in Hertfordshire to cater for growing artificial intelligence (AI) demand.
In a recent blog post, Google announced it will build a new $1bn – the equivalent to £788m – data centre in Waltham Cross, in Hertfordshire, around 12 miles north of central London.
The new site, which will be located on land at Maxwell’s Farm – a plot bought by Google in 2020, is being constructed as the global search engine claims the UK is a ‘key’ market for its business as well as being a ‘pioneering world leader in AI technology and science’.
Chancellor Jeremy Hunt has recently took to X (formally known as Twitter) and said: ‘Delighted to see this investment from Google. Reflects the success of the UK tech sector, which is now the third largest in the world after the US and China – worth over $1 trillion and double the size of anywhere in Europe.’
https://twitter.com/Jeremy_Hunt/status/1748053326468440078
Over the past decade AI, a term that was originally coined in 1956, has soared in the UK. Research that was published in summer 2023 found that the number of UK AI companies has increased by over 600% over the past ten years and around one in six organisations, totalling 432,000, have embraced it’s use.
Against this backdrop, the first UK-based Google Cloud Platform (GCP) data centre region went live in July 2017, with three availability zones and all of the supporting infrastructure housed in a colocation facility.
The latest development will not only help to enhance Google’s status in the UK and bolster the development of AI, but it will also feature off-site heat recovery technology that will see the facility’s waste heat redistributed for use by the community.
‘The Waltham Cross data centre represents our latest investment in the UK and the wide economy at large,’ Ruth Porat, president, chief investment officer and chief financial officer of Google’s parent company, Alphabet, said. ‘This investment builds upon our St Giles and Kings Cross office developments, our multi-year research collaboration agreement with the University of Cambridge, and the Grace Hopper subsea cable that connects the UK with the United States and Spain.’
Ruth added: ‘This new datacentre will meet the growing demand for AI and cloud services and bring crucial compute capacity to businesses across the UK while creating construction and technical jobs for the local community. Together with the UK government, we are working to make AI more helpful and accessible for people and organisations across the country.’
Commenting on the news, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, who saw the announcement as a sign of the company’s confidence in the government’s ambitions to transform the UK into a technology and science superpower, said: ‘The UK is a fantastic place to invest, and Google’s $1bn investment is testament to the fact that the UK is a centre of excellence in technology and has huge potential for growth.
‘Foreign investment creates jobs and grows all regions of our economy, and investments like this will help to drive growth in the decade ahead. I will continue to back businesses to invest and innovate here in the UK.’
Image: Google
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