“A planned $1 billion Apple data center is in doubt after Irish Prime Minister Leo Varadkar said the U.S. company’s Chief Executive Tim Cook would no longer commit to it, adding that Dublin would do whatever necessary to get it built,” Conor Humphries reports for Reuters.
“Apple announced plans in February 2015 to build the facility in a rural location in the west of Ireland to take advantage of green energy sources nearby, but the project has faced a two-year delay due to planning objections,” Humphries reports. “In a meeting on Thursday, Cook did not commit to going ahead with it, Varadkar told state broadcaster RTE.”
Humphries reports, “A similar Apple center announced at the same time in Denmark is due to begin operations later this year and Apple in July announced it would build its second EU data center there.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Looks like Ireland’s prolonged dithering here may well have cost them the project.
SEE ALSO:
After years of delays, Apple finally gets the green light to build its $1 billion data center in Ireland – October 12, 2017
Apple to build second renewables-powered data center in Denmark – July 10, 2017
Apple’s $1 billion data center in Ireland faces High Court appeal as locals plan march in support – November 4, 2016
Apple’s €850m data center in Ireland finally gets green light – August 12, 2016
Apple’s huge data center in Ireland hits a snag – February 3, 2016
Some residents object to Apple’s planned new €850 million data center in Ireland – June 18, 2015
Apple’s strong commitment to the environment sets a powerful example for other companies – May 15, 2015
Apple to invest €1.7 billion to build two new european data centers – February 23, 2015
maybe it’s a bunch of mid-level state employees screwin’ it up.
Stop that
Quite possible, the administrative bureaucracy is more powerful than any individuals nominally in charge of it.
Made me think of the movie, Local Hero.
Tim Cook hopes that Trump Tax Reform will permit Apple to build the data center in USA.
MAGA, Tim. Just follow Trumps lead.
You can’t put a data center for European customers in the US. The speed of light is not infinite.
Exceeded only by the speed of stupid!
Connection through satellites would have a built in lag time of about a quarter of a second for communications up and back to the 22,500 mile geosynchronous orbit. There is no getting around it due to the speed of light (and microwave signals).
So how fast would it take a photon to travel through a fiber optic cable over a distance of 5,000 miles? One hour? Two hours? Three weeks? A month?
An Apple branded photon, or everyone else’s?
Assuming that you were asking a serious question, the lag time for a transatlantic cable is significantly less than satellite. That’s why stock trades are transmitted that way. It still isn’t suitable or cost-effective for huge volumes of data.
26.9 milliseconds. Not insignificant at all.
26.9 milliseconds? That’s like forever according to Apple fanboys.
100 round trips cost almost a minute. It adds up!
I wonder how long it takes for synapses to fire in the cranium of an Apple fanboy. I reckon many would score zero on the Glascow Coma Scale.
Typo… 1000 round trips…
Why wouldn’t local people want a data center? They’re quiet and don’t seem to do any harm to the environment. Apple tries to make them energy efficient as possible. It seems rather foolish to turn down something like that. The only thing is that it doesn’t require much personnel to run a data center over the long-term. However, at least there will be some immediate short-term construction jobs to build the data center.
We have an Apple data center near us. Some people think it’s great- others say it’s just a big corporate boondoggle- with all local benefit offset by massive tax forgiveness. There is no doubt that it benefits local construction. The ongoing benefits are harder to quantify.
Interesting, not quite the easy decision it might seem I guess it’s a balance of interests that we are not a party to as outsiders.
We may be outsiders but we always seem to have all the answers. We don’t agree on them, but we got lotsa answers.
Sorry, supposed to say no doubt that it benefits local construction, but once built i believe the jobs impact on community is minimal. That being said, seems to me having the worlds soon-to-be first trillion dollar company investing in my region is a good thing long term.
Why would you say that? Because it’s Apple? Construction is relatively short term and once it’s done there really are no other benefits. You people are employed yet the surrounding area pays through the nose. Having apple in my backyard wouldn’t matter for this area one bit. There’s way too many incentives been given to corporate America and they don’t need it
You really don’t know what you are talking about. The surrounding taxpayer do not pay anything. Tax incentives do not come from the surrounding taxpayers “through the nose” but rather they are merely REDUCTIONS in the taxes the “subsidized” business entity would have had to pay in the future and which would NEVER have been there had the business not been enticed to move there by the incentives in the first place.
For example, lets look at Apple’s incentives to locate in a specific location by being given property tax forgiveness for 20 years. Had they NOT been given the 50% property tax forgiveness for those 20 years, the county where they would locate would get ZERO tax revenues, but instead, Apple will pay 50% of the taxes they would normally be charged for those 20 years. and the county will receive a huge influx of tax revenue instead of ZERO. Not a single dollar of those tax revenues come from the other tax payers in the area.
In one example I can think of, Apple was the single largest tax payer in the county, paying 60% of the property taxes in the county. . . money that county would NOT have received had they not been incentivized to locate there. Those extra tax dollars allowed that county to do a lot more than they would have before. Apple also negotiated to pay a lot of those property taxes up-front, in the first year as part of the incentive. . . chicken feed dollars for Apple but a huge windfall for the county which allowed major infrastructure building for the county they would never have been able to do without Apple’s influx of cash.
So much for your specious arguments.
well said
I was too tired to chime in earlier on this after arguing in the forum about Apple’s reparation of overseas profits, trying to explain Apple was ‘not trying to cheat’ American taxpayers, that they already pay USA taxes on USA sales and reparation was about OVERSEAS profits that have already been taxed in foreign countries
. Taxing that money again at full rate means Apple and other companies will either let the money sit there or spend it elsewhere (like Apple spending a billion on a Chinese Taxi service last year). I also said that if people think like Rob above “way too many incentives been given to corporate America and they don’t need it” and be too unreasonable then American companies will simply MOVE like Burger King has moved it’s financial HQ to Canada for lower taxes, … (in Today’s World capital is FLUID and places have to make it fair and competitive to businesses otherwise they would simply GO.. )
After giving lots of examples etc, the idiots they other day called me ‘DaveWrong’ yet today we’ve got ANOTHER example of what I was saying about capital moving as Apple is planning it’s second data centre in Denmark vs Ireland…
So I was too tired to explain the ‘tax incentive’ things for Data Centres but you did a superb job doing it.
Satellites are so 1970s. Even the latest satellites carry no more than 150 Gb/s. The newest transatlantic cable can carry 160 Tb/s, more than 1000 times greater. The biggest buyers of submarine cables over the last few years have been Google, Microsoft and Facebook. Apple and Amazon are out there buying up capacity. Ireland happens to be in a good location, with cables to both North America and Europe.