Construction progresses on first Munster data centre at Cork's Little Island
Construction work in progress this week on JCD's data centre - Munster's first - at Little Island, Cork.
CONSTRUCTION work on the first data centre to be built in Munster is now well-advanced, close to the Dunkathel interchange at Little Island, with developers JCD Group said to be “in advanced negotiations with a number of potential operators.”
Development of the first 86,000 sq ft building finally commenced in 2022, via Summerhill Construction, with planning for one other similar scale building, plus a hyperscale centre at the same location.
The profile site, near the Jack Lynch Tunnel, has been ear-marked for technology campus/data centre use since 2016, with previous reports of a €200 million data-based development on the 32-acre landbank but work to deliver had been slow to commence.
It’s one of the first data centres outside of the Greater Dublin catchment, with about 70 centres currently operational and with future proposed centres tied by Government policy to on-site power supply capacity, as the burgeoning sector already consumes an estimated 14% of national power generation.
The Cork site has had planning for data centre use for a number of years, and Clare County Council recently granted approval for a €450m centre near Ennis.
This Cork site now under development had previously been in heavy industrial use since then 1970s by electrolytic manganese dioxide producers, the Japanese firm Mitsui Denman, who wound up operations there on a 100 acre holding in 2003.
I
t subsequently sold on several occasions, with Howard Holdings paying €30m for 32 acres to decant port facilities from the city quays: it last sold via receivers KPMG to JCD Group in 2016 for an unconfirmed c €3 million.
Advantages of the Cork location previously cited include less critical power supply levels in the region (the campus has access to 60MW of power from a nearby substation) and access to two super-fast fibre cables with low latency — one, the GTT Express cable, linked Ireland to the US since 2015 after a transatlantic cable landed at Garretstown in 2015.
A spokesperson for JCD this week confirmed the advanced construction “on a next-generation data centre, the first of its kind to be developed in Cork,” saying the 86,000 sq ft data centre was “being built to the highest environmental LEED standard, which is the US Green Building Council’s approved energy rating for such facilities.”
“As a next-generation data centre, even though Cork is an unconstrained area from a power perspective, the project is designed to generate power onsite and export it back to the national grid at times if it is required,” the spokesperson added, but didn’t outline the source of that on-site power generation.
According to JCD Group, “this new development will be the first data centre of scale to be built in Ireland outside of the greater Dublin area, a move that has been facilitated by the provision of exceptional fibre connectivity. It is also seen as critical infrastructure supporting the many IT companies based in Cork and surrounding areas, all of which provide thousands of jobs for the region."
Access to the GTT Express Cable “will allow the future operator to avail of the lowest fibre latency available between the US and Europe,” said the spokesperson, noting that the site “is also linked to the T50 network in Dublin through a new Aurora cable, providing what the industry calls “dark fibre access” that enables ultra-low latency between Cork and the existing fibre network in Ireland.”
“We are very happy with the progress to date on the Little Island site. Cork presents an excellent alternative to companies seeking to host their data in Ireland in the face of stiff competition from other European locations and underpins the significant cluster of technology companies that already exist in Cork,” said JCD.
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