To accommodate the region’s growing demand for internet services, Google announced on Thursday that it will invest $1 billion in the construction of a data centre just outside of London. This is the company’s latest investment in the United Kingdom.
The data centre will be situated in the town of Waltham Cross, around 15 miles north of central London, on 33-acre (13-hectare) land that Google purchased in 2020, according to a statement from the Alphabet-owned company.
Google’s investment was hailed by the British government as a “huge vote of confidence” in the UK. The government is pressing for industry investment to help fund new infrastructure, particularly in emerging industries like technology and artificial intelligence.
In a Google statement, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak stated, “Google’s $1 billion investment is a testament to the fact that the UK is a centre of excellence in technology and has huge growth potential.”
The investment comes after Google spent $1 billion to buy an office building in 2022 near Covent Garden in downtown London and another property in King’s Cross, where it is also constructing a new office and based its AI startup, DeepMind.
It was just a few weeks after Microsoft revealed its intentions to invest 2.5 billion pounds ($3.2 billion) in Britain over three years, including expanding the capacity of its data centres to support AI services in the future.
Alphabet Chief Financial Officer Ruth Porat stated in the release, “This new data centre will help meet the growing demand for our AI and cloud services and bring crucial compute capacity to businesses across the UK while creating construction and technical jobs.”
