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This is probably the first time someone has described the west coast of Ireland as "not cold enough".

(More seriously, the choice of Ireland will be for tax reasons)

Aye, I'd concur with that. Pretty unusual/interesting that they chose Athenry Co. Galway though - I guess specific location is pretty irrelevant in a tiny country like Ireland but I would have imagined that Cork would be the default choice, since the EMEIA HQ is there too. Good news for Athenry in any case!

Nah, Cork wouldn't be a good place for something like this, other than the fact that a good amount of submarine cable lands there. But then by that, Wexford would be even better.

The big reason for putting stuff on the west coast is wind and cooling.

Doesn't hurt that Athenry is close enough to Galway City, and that makes it a great place to live. Frankly, if I was a network engineer, I'd totally be down for moving to Galway.

Galway is a great spot alright, although I have to admit I do prefer living in Cork ;)

I don't know anything substantial about data centres so I wasn't basing my assumptions on their real-world requirements.

That said however, isn't Athenry a bit inland itself? You'd imagine far west Galway would be better again, with the added potential - I assume - to create infrastructure their own offshore wind energy.

'tax reasons' are actually why I find this most surprising. The "Double Irish" tax arrangement is being phased out, which has led some to worry that companies that are only here to take advantage of it, may move on.

Seeing the complete opposite happening is very reassuring (as a local).

The double irish is under pressure but core Corp Tax is still 12.5%. Much lower than anywhere else. so tax is a good reason to do this in Ireland.

In addition, Irish gov are talking about new R&D scheme which will be like 6-7% corp tax on companies that focus on R&D. Alot of European companies have such schemes and Ireland can't be singled out for being "dodgy" with this. I suspect Apple will benefit from this.

Of course we (being Ireland) wouldn't get all this investment if Apple (and all the other US multinationals) was allowed to repatriate profits back to the US without paying the draconian US corp tax of 35%.

Companies like Oracle, Apple, Microsoft, Google, Facebook, Cisco have huge amounts of cash sitting there in their balance sheets. They spend it in other countries (and/or issue new bonds) to avoid paying the stupid 35% US corp tax.

Once the Republicans and Democrats get their act together on this, Ireland will be screwed.

I'm sure the tax makes it competitive compared others in the same time zone like London, Amsterdam or Berlin, but to me it seems to be succeeding in creating a critical mass of tech skills around Dublin that can stick beyond the taxes. If it was purely down to tax, a lot of companies could have just moved shop to Gibraltar 4 years ago.

The "draconian" US corporate tax rate isn't so draconian when you consider the capital gains rate is way lower than most places, including Ireland.

> Once the Republicans and Democrats get their act together on this

So, seems unlikely then ;-)

I'm wondering if this is partially a play by Apple to sway Irish public opinion away from the notion of putting a stop to these manipulations of International tax law.

> and what the 3 billion 30% cut they took from developers could have done for those developers. Better apps?

More money for the 1% of top apps actually making money (Rovio, King, EA, etc), more like. A 30% cut is not bad at all, especially if you compare it to traditional software - retailers often charge an easy 40% markup over wholesale prices, and that's the last step before it reaches the consumer.

Re: colder countries, what is the environmental impact of internet signals having to travel a longer distance? higher latency for each request, times a billion phones? These are probably trivially small figures, but there's a lot of factors to take into consideration.

> However, since the power generation is inland it is wasting land which could be used for people and food.

Really? You know how much surface area a datacenter takes up in comparison to everything else, right? (hint: not much). And people generally prefer to live in the city anyway (else there wouldn't be any cities, just a big sprawl of suburbia)

Why they didn't choose colder countries?

(1) Ambient temperature is not very important. In a data center, you want to cool large arrays of small machines -- for that purpose, whether it's cold or hot outside the building doesn't matter very much. The 10-degree difference in outside air temperature is basically irrelevant you're trying to stop components from overheating.

(2) If you want places that are substantially colder, then you're looking at places that are far more "off-grid" i.e. remote. That may create substantial infrastructural difficulties (internet access, hardware supply, electrical supply, etc.). There's a reason why Google hasn't put all their datacenters on Antarctica.

(3) Denmark and Ireland already have good environmentally sustainable energy sources in place, more so than many other alternative locations. This move is about environmental policy.

Well, one of the big advantages of Ireland is that it's the coldest country in Europe with a decent amount of transatlantic fibre running by its coast, and it has pretty stable temperatures.

Ambient temperature can be very useful if you're building a datacentre. I work for the largest hosting provider in Ireland, and our new datacentre uses the temperature differential between the inside of our pods and the outside air to do energy recovery and cooling, and it's pretty effective . I'm a developer, so I don't have all the details, but I'll ask our CTO later for the details, if I've time.

> Well, one of the big advantages of Ireland is that it's the coldest country in Europe [...]

Perhaps you are confusing Ireland with Iceland? (seems improbable since you work in Ireland) Even then, Finland is colder than either of them although its coldest parts are not so easily accessible.

Coldest country with transatlantic fibre running by its coast... though a fibre running by a coast is not good in itself, you actually need to terminate the fibre in your country.

(Like at my home, the council built a fibre to a nearby facility, but I can't plug into a fibre as it passes the house on the nearby street, underground...)

Google has also set up a data center in Finland, where it indeed is colder; this one recycles a former paper mill and its energy connections. http://www.google.com/about/datacenters/inside/locations/ham...

You clipped off the important bit:

> Well, one of the big advantages of Ireland is that it's the coldest country in Europe with a decent amount of transatlantic fibre running by its coast

It's the fibre that's the key bit there.

4. Ireland has some pretty good tax breaks.

5. Amazon house their EU-West data centre there so infrastructure should be fairly good.

6. And it's pretty god damn windy there - perfect for "green" wind turbines.

Ireland isn't actually a bad spot for this kind of infrastructure. Transit options are great because major transatlantic links actually make landfall in Ireland on the UK->US span. And the Atlantic seaboard has more wind than you could ever want (as my hair this morning will attest to ..)

Still waiting for the Apple datacenter in the Swiss Alps. There are some de-militarized Bunkers available. And it's cold as it gets up at 3000m...