Facebook is opening its first data center in Ireland.
Located near Dublin, in Clonee, County Meath, the new high-tech venue will be powered by 100 percent renewable energy, thanks to infrastructure designed and built as part of the industry-wide Open Compute Program.
"This will help us reach our goal of powering 50 percent of our infrastructure with clean and renewable energy by the end of 2018," Facebook's Tom Furlong wrote in a blog post.
"Ireland has been our international headquarters since 2009, and our new Clonee data center will continue Facebook's significant investment in the country and in Europe," Furlong said. It "will become part of the infrastructure that enables billions of people to connect with the people and things they care about on Facebook, Messenger, Instagram, and more."
Facebook's first European data center, in Lulea, Sweden, went live in 2013.
The news comes three months after the invalidation of a U.S.-EU "safe harbor" data transfer deal. Set up 15 years ago to help companies conduct business, the deal ensured that 4,000-plus European and American tech and non-tech businesses would treat data moving between countries with the same privacy protections as inside the region. But it came under fire following the mass surveillance revelations in the Snowden documents.
In November, the European Commission said it intends to wrap up discussions on a new deal within three months.