Google’s relentless focus on innovation resulted in its data centers being among the world’s most high-performing, secure, reliable and efficient. Google has set the bar high with its innovative uses of technologies. Case in point, the company (founded in 1998 with green initiatives) announced last year that their global information empire would run entirely on carbon-free energy by 2030. Google became the first carbon-neutral Internet company in 2007.
Google has been continuing to spend heavily on growing its data center fleet. According to Google’s CEO Sundar Pichai, Google plans to spend $7 billion on data centers and offices across the US in 2021 while expanding existing data centers in Nebraska, South Carolina, Virginia, Nevada and Texas. This investment is reported to create at least 10,000 new, full-time jobs in the US. In the pages that follow, Kava goes in depth on the unprecedented impact of the pandemic on demand for Google services, how Google handled the traffic surge and strategies for significant operational and sustainability implementations across 23 data center campuses on four continents. Continuing the sustainability narrative, Texier details future data center industry challenges and Google’s innovative use of technology to meet green goals, specifically carbon-free energy via the first battery-based system to replace generators at hyperscale data centers.
