Google to launch data center in Tennessee, work on Alabama site starts soon
By Lucy Berry | lberry@al.com
Google's Southeast expansion continues with the addition of another data center in the fifth-largest city in Tennessee.
The Tennessean reports Google will launch a $600 million data center at the former Hemlock Semiconductor property in Clarksville, a city with more than 142,000 people in northeastern Montgomery County. Data centers power several common Google services, including its search engine, Gmail and Google+.
The Clarksville site will be the tech giant's 15th global data center. In June, Google announced it would open its first Alabama data center in Bridgeport, creating up to 100 high-paying jobs for residents of Jackson County and the surrounding areas.
Joe Kava, Google vice president for data center operations, told The Leaf-Chronicle in a phone interview this week the Clarksville location will be "one of the world's most efficient and most technically advanced data center campuses."
"The Internet is greatly expanding," he said, "and data centers are really the engines of the Internet. We need to increase our capacity to serve the users."
The data center in Clarksville will employ approximately 70 workers, from computer technicians and engineers to electricians and mechanics. The $600 million Alabama site will also have several full-time and contractor positions.
Like other Google data centers, the Alabama location will repurpose existing electric and other infrastructure to serve users around the globe. It will have Google-made servers, more efficient cooling, and advanced machine learning to squeeze more out of the power it consumes.
Google representative A.J. Jongewaard said the company is still formalizing plans for the Jackson County center and hopes to begin construction as soon as possible.
Take a walk through a Google data center in North Carolina by clicking here or watch the video below:
Link to video and more information: