Initial construction costs for the data centre would be around 700 million euros ($795 million) and no date has been set yet for completion pending necessary approvals, said Melanie Roe, spokesperson of Meta
On Thursday evening, the village of Zeewolde, which is 50KM east of Amsterdam, was set to approve plans by Meta for building the largest data centre in Netherlands from which users all over Europe will be served by Facebook, Instagram and Whatsapp.
Expected to run on green energy and provide the local economy a boost, the data centre will require 1.38GWh of electricity and cover 166 hectares (410 acres) of farmland, but the data centre has been criticised by some politicians and environmental campaigners, not least for the energy it will use.
While the country’s previous government lobbied to attract data-centres, including major facilities by Google and Microsoft that also run on renewable energy, parties in the process of forming the next government have taken a different view.
“Hyper-scale data-centres place an unreasonably large demand on the available renewable energy in relationship to their societal or economic value”, they wrote in their new governing pact published ahead of the Zeewolde council vote.
“We will be sharpening the national coordination and admissions criteria for licensing”.
Initial construction costs for the data centre would be around 700 million euros ($795 million) and no date has been set yet for completion pending necessary approvals, said Melanie Roe, spokesperson of Meta.
The 800,000-strong population of Amsterdam are heavy users of the data services provided by Meta; however, regional authorities have issued a ban on the construction of further data-centres near the city itself to avoid further strain on its electricity grid.
The Dutch Data Centre Association estimates that currently data-centres make up about three per cent of all Dutch electricity usage, but that may rise to 10 per cent by 2030.
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