Google announces $140 million investment to expand datacenter in Chile.
Google announced a plan to expand its data center campus in Chile with a $140 million investment on top of the $150 million it invested in its first data center there, which became operational in 2015. The expansion will nearly triple the size of the facility to 27.7 acres and will create 1,000 jobs during construction and 120 new permanent jobs, bringing the company's total investment in the data center campus to $290 million.
The Google data center in Chile was first announced in 2012 and became fully operational in 2015. Since 2017, it has operated entirely on solar power generated in Chile's Atacama desert area. The facility is used to deliver Google cloud applications including Gmail, Google Maps, YouTube, and Waze, as well as support artificial intelligence and machine learning development.
The announcement was made Wednesday at an event in Santiago attended by Chilean president Sebastián Piñera. Edgardo Frias, Google's general manager in Chile, said: "With this investment, we are preparing for the future. We seek to improve the data center with this development, because our users will demand more and more information." He added: "This expansion will mean improving our users' experience. We seek to make technology more accessible and easier to use." President Piñera stated: "What we have to decide is which side are we going to be on: where the new works of the future are created, or where the old works of the past are destroyed." The government has been working to diversify the country's copper-dominated economy and sees the development of digital technology as key to that diversification.
According to Reuters, the announcement came as Amazon Web Services has been negotiating with Chilean authorities over its interest in housing and mining data generated from the country's state-of-the-art telescopes. Currently, Chilean observatories account for about 70 percent of the money spent globally on astronomy due to favorable conditions in the country's Atacama desert.