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Facebook Building World's 'Most Advanced' Data Center In Irish Village (thestack.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Facebook has announced it is building a new data center in Clonee, Ireland, a small village close to Dublin. The facility, which CEO Mark Zuckerberg claims will be one of the "most advanced and energy efficient data centers in the world," will be the social network's second outside of the U.S., and its sixth globally. The new center will be located just a 30-minute drive from Facebook's international headquarters in the country's capital. It is expected to cost €200 million and employ around 2,000 people during the construction phase. The company hopes to open the facility in early 2018.
The reason companies like Facebook will pick Ireland is because it's a tax haven, and because it's where they amass many billions of otherwise unproductive dollars.
If they try and take it somewhere more useful then they'll have to inevitably pay the tax that, if they weren't avoiding (possibly even evading in some cases) it, they'd have had to have paid in the first place.
So they have the following choices
1) They have it sat in an Irish bank not really doing anything, and possibly depreciating in value due to lack of worthwhile investments in country
2) They bring it back to a more useful jurisdiction. By useful I mean one that has a high concentration of skilled tech professionals that can grow their business with new products and so on, or where they can use it to acquire other companies in that jurisdiction. The fact is, there is only so much you can spend in a country with a population of 4.6million before you've hired all the worthwhile tech professionals, and bought and invested in all the worthwhile companies. The combined fortunes of money stockpiled by big tech in Ireland is way more than is available to sensibly spend on so Ireland isn't that "useful" as a place to invest in people or businesses because there's just nowhere near enough to go around. The downside of moving it to a different jurisdiction is they'll lose a sizable proportion of it to tax, so they don't.
3) They spend it on something in Ireland that doesn't need much man power and doesn't involve trying to find a company to invest in or buy up.
This is an obvious case of option 3 - it's something they can build to use some of that stockpiled cash but that doesn't really cause too much of a problem in trying to fight with all the other hundreds of billions of stockpiled money in Ireland to get the resources for it - there's no point building a large high skilled software/product development office there for example because the population of Ireland will never ever be able to sustain the required levels of staff to make it work.
You could push the Irish government to allow for a new immigration scheme to allow them to bring in the necessary talent but then you'd get all the unskilled natives moaning about how they took their jobs even though they were never talented enough or qualified to do those jobs in question in the first place, which is a shame, because that ruins it for everyone because it means such a centre can't be built and the handful of people in the country who are talented and qualified enough don't have that opportunity made available to them.
So you're stuck with things like data centres that require few staff, and call centres that require unskilled staff, but even they're becoming less common in Ireland because places like India can provide unskilled staff far more cheaply.
They may as well use the money somehow, and this is about the best option available to them. It's probably near a village for the simple fact that that local council offered them the best local rates or subsidy to bring the handful of jobs and wealth it creates to their area.