Robert Sharpe, senior director of global data center services at Apple, provided evidence showing the importance of the company’s planned Irish data center at ahearing in Galway County, Ireland, this week, reports Business Insider.
In his opening statement — which can be read in full at the Business Insider site — explained that the €850 million (£649 million) data centre is vital to Apple’s future expansion plans across Europe. He said:
“Around the world, use of the internet continues to grow rapidly; annual global internet traffic is expected to treble over the next three years and more than quadruple over the next five years.
“Apple is experiencing huge demand for our hugely popular services including the App Store, Apple Music, Apple Pay and iCloud; every day our data centres handle tens of billions of messages, more than a billion photos, and tens of millions of FaceTime video calls.
“Our customers expect to be able to stream their videos and listen to their music wherever they happen to be and they have the highest expectations in terms of speed, responsiveness, reliability and quality. We currently have a number of active devices in use and this number continues to grow.
“Apple needs to add data centre capacity on a phased basis to provide the necessary processing and storage resources needed to meet this growing number of devices as well as the increased use of current and future devices.”
Apple’s plans are being held up by the Irish government, which is currently reviewing a number of appeals that were made after Galway Council granted the company planning permission to build a data center. Complainants argued that the data centre would increase noise and light pollution, flooding, and traffic. Some also said it would act as an eyesore and others said it would harm the local badger and bat populations.
