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Dutch town approves licence for Meta data centre, biggest in Netherlands -Breaking

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© Reuters. FILE PHOTO – A woman holding a smartphone sporting the Facebook logo is seen in front of an illustration that shows Facebook’s newly rebranded logo Meta. REUTERS/Dado Ruvic/Illustration/File Photo

By Toby Sterling and Stephanie van den Berg

AMSTERDAM (Reuters] -Meta approved on Thursday plans to create the Netherlands’ largest data center. This will allow Facebook (NASDAQ;), Instagram (and Whatsapp) users across Europe.

It will consume 1.38GWh electricity, cover 166 hectares (405 acres), of farmland and is expected to be run on renewable energy. However, some environmental activists and politicians have criticised the facility.

It is anticipated that the centre will create 400 jobs permanent in the city, with a population of around 20,000.

The country’s former economic affairs ministry tried to bring data centers to the Netherlands. These facilities included major data centers by Google (NASDAQ;) and Microsoft (NASDAQ.) which also use renewable energy. However, recent politicians began to question whether it should be the government that determines the location and number of data centres.

In their new governing agreement, the Prime Minister Mark Rutte party formed wrote that hyperscale data centers place an unreasonablely large demand upon available renewable energy relative to their economic or societal value. This was published one day before the Zeewolde council election.

“We will increase the country coordination and admissions requirements for licensing.”

Hendrik Visser is a VVD Party councilor. He acknowledged the drawbacks of having such a centre, but stated that the advantages were more for overall development.

He said, “Data centres are necessary to satisfy online needs.” They have to move somewhere and it is probably not imprudent to build them in Western Europe, centralized under our laws and to find out what they mean for Zeewolde.

Melanie Roe from Meta stated that the initial costs of construction would amount to around 700 million euro ($795m) but no deadline has been given.

Amsterdam has 800,000. However, the Meta data service is heavily used by Amsterdam residents. Regional authorities ban the construction of any additional Meta data centers due to electric grid strain.

Dutch Data Centre Association believes that data centres account for 3% to 5% of Dutch electricity use, although this could increase to 10% by 2030.

($1 = 0.8812 euros)

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