Google has started building a $1bn data centre north of London that will be powered by Scottish offshore wind.
The data centre will be located on a 33-acre site that the US tech giant bought in the town of Waltham Cross in Hertfordshire.
Google previously struck a deal to green the power supplies to its UK operations with 100MW-worth of electricity from the 882MW Moray West offshore wind farm being built by developer Ocean Winds off Scotland.
Ruth Porat, CFO of Google and its parent company Alphabet, said the new data centre will help meet “growing demand for our AI and cloud services”.
Moray West is one of the first wind farms globally to mainly rely on corporate power deals from the likes of web giant Google rather than government support schemes. Amazon is also reportedly considering investing in the project.
It reached financial close after nailing down $2.5bn of project finance.
Installation kicked off last year with the first monopiles being installed for the 60 Siemens Gamesa 14.7MW wind turbines that will be deployed – the first use of the supersized machines anywhere in the world.
It is expected to fully come online in 2025.
Google is targeting reaching net zero emissions across its operations and value chain by 2030. It said the Moray West deal puts it on track to operate at or near 90% carbon-free energy in the UK by 2025.
