The town of Zeewolde has approved the construction of Meta’s data centre in the region.
The largest data centre in the Netherlands will serve all users of Meta (Instagram, Facebook, WhatsApp) across Europe.
The facility is to cover an area of 166 hectares and consume 1.38 GWH of electricity. Meta spokeswoman Melanie Roe estimates the initial construction costs of the data centre at around 700 million euros. A completion date has not yet been set. As soon as the centre is completed, 400 permanent jobs will be created in the town.
While in some places the concept of a data centre still raises eyebrows, Hendrik Visser, a council member for the VVD Party explained that the advantage of a data centre far outweighs its disadvantage.
He clarified, “To satisfy our online needs, data centres are simply necessary. They have to go somewhere, and it’s probably not imprudent to build them here in Western Europe, centralized under our laws, and to see what they can mean in this case for Zeewolde.”