Belgium newspaper – Le Soir – has revealed that Google is to open a new 120-person data centre in the French-speaking part of Belgium (known as Wallonie in Belgium) near a town called Ghlin-Baudour (See map) covering a site of 85 hectares or 210 acres of land. The 120 people are required for management, data management, maintenance and security according to Google, says Le Soir.
Construction begins in the Summer and will take until 2008 and the site will use the nearby canal for water cooling of the computer hardware. The site also benefits from access to a fibre optic network and the total invesment will exceed 250 million Euros.
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Andy Atkins-Kruger
CEO at Webcertain
Andy is the CEO of Webcertain. He is a trained linguist with 20 years of experience in international marketing, having helped major brand leaders with their advertising and public relations projects on five continents. Webcertain has been operating multilingual search marketing campaigns for over 15 years and is one of few agencies which only deal with international campaigns; the company doesn't deal in single market projects. Andy speaks regularly at conferences around the world.
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And flemish people are extremist and little minded
Seems Google didn’t do their homework very well. Wallonia has a very bad work ethos (strong labour unions, many strikes, high rates of inexplicable absenteeism, people don’t speak foreign languages, etc. etc.)
I think its great news, Anything positive in this region gets my thumbs up….as for the previous remark…there are incompetent vegtables every where, especially when it comes to making remarks about others!!
They’ll be sorry for that! Wait till the see what a bunch of incompetent vegetables the Belgians are
Hi Andy,
Finally some Google muscle to bring worthy jobs to overlooked Wallonia, normally its the boys in Ghent that get all the tech business.
One small comment though, the map link sends you to Google Maps in flemish with the entry declaring that Google’s new datacenter will be in Bergen! Bergen is however the Flemish name for the city of Mons, which can be very confusing when you are driving around in Flanders looking for Mons!!!! 😉
Here’s the Walloon link: http://maps.google.be/maps?f=q&hl=fr&q=Ghlin-Baudour&sll=50.846719,4.352506&sspn=3.857125,11.425781&layer=&ie=UTF8&z=8&ll=50.492491,3.906713&spn=1.558632,2.856445&om=0