Google will invest $3.3B to increase its data center capacity in South Carolina

Google LLC will spend $3.3 billion to construct two new knowledge facilities in South Carolina and broaden an current cloud campus. 

The Alphabet Inc. detailed the mission on Thursday. It’s the newest in a string of 10-figure knowledge middle investments that the corporate has introduced for the reason that begin of the yr. In the identical timeframe, Google committed to constructing a number of new subsea web cables that may assist course of knowledge site visitors between its cloud amenities. 

The search large constructed its first South Carolina knowledge middle campus within the state’s Berkeley County greater than a decade in the past. A couple of years later, it spent $600 million to broaden the location by developing a 3rd cloud facility on the premises. The funding introduced this week will see Google make investments $1.3 billion to make additional upgrades and bolster the location’s workforce, which at present includes about 900 staffers.

The remainder of the $3.3 billion funding will go towards two new knowledge facilities. They are going to be positioned in South Carolina’s Dorchester County, which is instantly adjoining to Berkeley County. Google expects the mission to create 1,200 long-term building jobs together with 200 operational positions.

Cloud suppliers are investing closely to broaden their synthetic intelligence infrastructure. In April, Insider reported that Microsoft Corp. plans to equip its knowledge facilities with 1.8 million graphics playing cards by yr’s finish. Google didn’t specify what {hardware} will probably be put in in its South Carolina amenities, nevertheless it’s potential the corporate will use the chance to develop the variety of AI chips it might probably provide to cloud prospects.

Google’s knowledge facilities run not solely Nvidia Corp. graphics playing cards but in addition internally developed AI accelerators. The corporate debuted Trillium, the newest addition to its line of customized machine studying chips, in Could. The processor offers 4.7 instances the height efficiency of Google’s previous-generation silicon.

One contributor to Trillum’s pace is that the search large doubled the quantity of onboard HBM reminiscence. Shifting knowledge to and from a chip’s onboard reminiscence is quicker than utilizing exterior RAM, which boosts AI fashions’ efficiency. Google has additionally geared up the processor with a module optimized to hurry up product suggestion algorithms. 

Google is rolling out Trillium to its knowledge facilities as a part of AI clusters, or pods, that every include as much as 256 chips. These pods additionally embrace one other customized processor referred to as Titanium. The latter chip can offload sure cybersecurity and networking duties from an AI cluster’s principal processors, which leaves extra compute capability for buyer workloads.

Google’s funding in South Carolina comes about 4 months after its earlier knowledge middle enlargement initiative. In Could, the corporate announced plans to improve its Hamina, Finland, cloud facility at a price of €1 billion. A couple of weeks earlier, Google committed $2 billion to a brand new knowledge middle campus in Indiana.

Picture: Google