Google Plans Second Chilean Data Center

Google is planning to build a $200 million data center campus in Santiago, Chile - the company’s second in the country.By Will Calvert, Data Centre Dynamics
July 24, 2019

Environmental assessment filings reveal $200m project

Google is planning to build a $200 million data center campus in Santiago, Chile – the company’s second in the both the country and Latin America.

The cloud giant has submitted a filing to the Chilean Environmental Assessment Service (Servicio de Evaluacion Ambiental, or SEA) to start an environmental appraisal process which needs to be successfully completed before Google can start building the data center.

Santiago-bound

Registered under the company name Inversiones Y Servicios Dataluna Ltda, the filing – first reported by bnamericas – shows that Google's 23 hectares (2.47 million square feet) campus will be built in two phases. The SEA document notes that both phases will be built concurrently after infrastructure like the onsite substation is completed.

A Google spokesperson told DCD: “We're always exploring new possibilities to improve our infrastructure. At this point, we don't have anything to announce.”

The SEA filing shows that construction is due to begin onsite in January 2020 and the data center is intended to work for 28 years. The data center site will be located between the communes of San Bernardo and Cerrillos in the province of Santiago.

Google first announced its plans to build in Chile in September 2012, but the facility did not come online until 2015. Since then, has Google tripled the size of the campus to 11.2 hectares (1.2m sq ft) and brought the overall investment in the site to $290 million.

In April this year, Google landed its private submarine cable Curie in Valparaíso, Chile. The Curie cable is the first to be primarily funded by a major non-telecom tech company and connects Latin America directly to the Equinix LA4 data center in Los Angeles, California. The four-fiber-pair cable also has a branching unit for possible future connectivity to Panama.

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