Google continues to invest heavily in new data centers in Belgium. Approval has now been received for the construction of a site in Farciennes near Charleroi.

Good news for Google: the Walloon Region has granted the American tech giant an urban planning permit to build a new data center site in Farciennes, a municipality near Charleroi. Google bought property there in 2021 and now has the necessary papers to build on it. Three new data centers would be built.

Green data center

Google not only received permission, delegated official Raphael Stokis explains to VRTNWS. With the granting of approval, conditions were imposed for the construction of a “green data center”. For example, the tech giant must ensure that at least 90 percent of the energy used at the site is carbon-free by 2025. By 2030 it must be at least 95 percent.

Google will install solar panels as much as possible and use batteries instead of diesel engines to absorb any power outages, a technique the company already uses in its other Belgian data centers. A sustainable cooling system must also be built. The water to cool the servers will come from the wells of the Sambre River. Last summer we spoke to Google about how the company plans to make its data centers even more sustainable.

3 billion euros

The data centers are primarily of economic importance. The municipality of Farciennes enjoys the dubious reputation of being the poorest municipality in Wallonia. Google expects to create four hundred direct jobs and the same number of indirect jobs in the data centers.

The company has been present with data centers in Belgium since 2010 and has already invested almost three billion euros in the Saint-Ghislain site, which employs four hundred people. The construction of the Farciennes site could cost a further 600 million euros. In 2022, it also secured a property near La Louvière, although Google’s specific plans there are not yet known. For now, Google appears to be keeping this as a trump card in case further expansion proves necessary.