Expansion of Google data center in SC to make it one of the company’s largest
When Google CEO Sundar Pichai said, “Data centers in Oklahoma and South Carolina will expand,” that might have been an understatement.
Pichai made the statement in a Wednesday blog post. On Friday, Gov. Henry McMaster visited the center for its 10 year anniversary of operating in South Carolina. While the company’s been in the Palmetto State for a decade, for the last couple months, the Google data center in Berkeley county has been undergoing an expansion that when completed would make the complex one of its five largest facilities when completed, Thad Moore of The Post and Courier reported.
Pichai wrote that a $13 billion investment throughout 2019 in data centers and offices across the U.S. “will give us the capacity to hire tens of thousands of employees, and enable the creation of more than 10,000 new construction jobs in Nebraska, Nevada, Ohio, Texas, Oklahoma, South Carolina and Virginia.”
With the expansion of the center that’s located in the Mount Holly Commerce Park near Moncks Corner, South Carolina also comes a water use issue that environmentalist have rallied against.
Google is already allowed to use a half million gallons of ground water a day to cool its expansive campus of equipment. With the new construction, the company is asking the Department of Health and Environment Control to triple their allowance, calling for up to 1.5 millions gallons of water, a prospect that’s riled environmental groups before with the state agency denying the California based company permission for the water in the past, The Post and Courier reported.
The South Carolina expansion is worth $600 million, according to the AP.