14 DAY TRIAL // Amazon is expanding greatly in Europe with the acquisition of a large warehouse in Dublin to house a huge new data center. The new location will power Amazon's Web Services unit and will serve the European region. There are official confirmations but only an estimated price. The deal is believed to be one of the biggest industrial property transactions in the city in the past year.
The news was first reported by the Irish Independent. The paper reports that the facility has been for sale for two years before finding a suitable buyer.
The building belonged to supermarket chain Tesco which used it as a regional storage facility. It will now house a huge new Amazon data center.
The facility has 22,539 square meters of space, about 240,000 square feet. But even this is not enough for Amazon which has leased space in two other parts of Dublin that it will also use for data centers.
Amazon has big ambitions for its cloud services and it has been expanding the number of products it offers at a fast rate. Already, it is estimated that Amazon is bringing in serious revenue from EC2 and the other cloud services it offers, about $500 million in 2010.
That's not a huge figure for Amazon, which had a revenue of over $34 billion in the past year, but the money from AWS is expected to grow to $900 million in 2011. Amazon doesn't break out financial details for its cloud services unit.
Ireland is becoming the technological hub of Europe, as foreign companies, mostly from the US, prefer to locate there due to the lower corporation tax than pretty much anywhere else on the continent.
Google, Facebook and others have their regional headquarters in Ireland, Dublin in particular. Already, Amazon accounts for a huge amount of the outgoing web server traffic from Ireland. According to monitoring firm Netcraft, the number of web servers in the country surged after Amazon set up shop there in 2009.