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Facebook brings European cats' snaps closer to home with £151m Irish data centre

Hmm, wonder why it chose Emerald Isle location?

Facebook is to open its second data centre in Europe, this time in the corporation tax-lite Republic of Ireland.

The data centre is being built on a 220 acre site at a reported cost of €200m (£151m).

The ad platform said the facility will support the sharing of thousands of cat, food and baby images on Facebook, Messenger and Instagram.

The biz now has six data centres around the globe. However, its Irish data centre is dwarfed by its Swedish server farm, built in 2011, which takes up 900,000 square metres and reportedly cost $760m (£533m).

The base in Ireland’s Clonee village, just outside of Dublin, will contain racks and servers that have been built from scratch as part of the Open Compute Project, an industry-wide group to create energy-efficient infrastructure and share it as open source. It will also be powered by 100 per cent renewable energy – using Ireland's wind resources – it said in a statement.

The republic of Ireland has been Facebook's international headquarters since 2009. The country has proved to be popular with other Silicon Valley big tech types, such as Apple and Google, which are drawn to its low 12.5 per cent corporation tax.

Ireland has also been criticised for its tax avoidance schemes, particularly the "Double Irish" structure which doesn't tax companies physically based in the country but which are "resident" wherever their central management are located. ®

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