The tech giant has started building the new centre on a 33-acre site in Waltham Cross, Hertfordshire that it bought in October 2020.
Once construction is complete, the data centre will support the company's AI innovations and cloud-based operations, including Google Cloud, Workspace, Search and Maps.
Google is the latest tech company to announce new operations in the UK, following OpenAI revealing plans to open its first office outside the US in London in June 2023. C3.AI also relocated its Europe headquarters to the capital in April 2023.
Ruth Porat, president and chief investment officer at Google, said, “This new data centre will help meet growing demand for our AI and cloud services and bring crucial compute capacity to businesses across the UK while creating construction and technical jobs for the local community.
"Together with the UK government, we are working to make AI more helpful and accessible for people and organisations across the country.”
Matt Rees, CTO at Neos Networks, said, “Google's establishment of a new data centre in the UK, just outside of London, reflects a broader trend among major cloud companies strategically locating their data centres close to highly populated and business-centric areas. This move is driven by the growing demand for low-latency and high-bandwidth connectivity, especially in the context of emerging technologies like artificial intelligence and other applications that rely on real-time data processing.
"Moreover, positioning data centres in the UK holds strategic significance for serving both European and transatlantic markets. The UK serves as a pivotal gateway between Europe and the United States, offering a central and well-connected location for cloud services. This strategic positioning enhances the efficiency of data transfer, ensuring that services are not only accessible but also delivered with optimal speed and reliability to users across these regions.”
Chancellor Jeremy Hunt said the move was a "huge vote of confidence in Britain as the largest tech economy in Europe, bringing with it good jobs and the infrastructure we need to support the industries of the future”.
This announcement builds Google’s the $1 billion purchase of its Central Saint Giles office in 2022, a 1 million sq ft development in King’s Cross. The company also launched its Accessibility Discovery Centre in December 2022, aimed at creating accessible tech for the UK.
The investment is happening at a time of increasing regulatory scrutiny of cloud providers. In October, the CMA announced that Britain £7.5 billion cloud services market would be subject to a full investigation over concerns about larger player such as Amazon and Microsoft unfairly disincentivising customers from using smaller providers.
It follows a market study into the sector by Ofcom, urging the CMA to investigate major cloud providers more deeply.
Ofcom said that it was concerned about high exit fees charged by cloud providers as well as interoperability barriers that have been artificially raised to make it hard to switch providers.