MWB Konnect, a joint venture company established by property group Marylebone Warwick Balfour and the European e-business incubator company Antfactory, is planning to build a £150 million (€191 million) data hosting centre in Dublin.
Antfactory specialises in helping traditional blue chip companies develop web strategies and would be likely to attract leading international clients for such a centre.
The consortium has lodged an application for planning permission with Fingal County Council to build the hosting centre on an 11.2-acre site in the Ballycoolin industrial estate in west Dublin. It hopes to begin construction within three months. The proposed data centre would be double the size of existing data centres in the Republic and would rival the largest existing European Internet hosting facilities.
If planning permission were granted it would boost the ability of companies to engage in e-commerce and prove a major coup for the Government which is seeking to establish Dublin as the premier European e-commerce hub.
Plans for the centre show it would have a data storage capacity of 300,000-square feet, office space of 20,000-square feet and an energy centre to provide it with power to run thousands of servers. A source said yesterday that Ballycoolin was chosen because it had particularly good fibre and power connections. Such a facility would require power equivalent to the needs of a small town, according to one source. It would be built on a staged basis, with the outer shell costing £53 million sterling (€88 million) and nine additional units being added over time at a cost estimated at £11 million each. It would employ 35-40 people when fully operational.
The centre will use very high speed Internet connectivity supplied by bandwidth from the firm 360 Networks, which recently opened a $70 million (€80 million) cable landing station, to provide customers with web hosting facilities.
It is understood MWB Konnect is in talks with two Irish-based telecoms companies about providing further connectivity to the centre although no contract has yet been signed.
Mr Phil Moffat, technical director with MWB Konnect, said the Dublin centre was one of several planned for Europe. The company has already identified and locked in land in Frankfurt, Lisbon and Madrid, he added.
The company was launched earlier this week as a joint venture partnership between Marylebone Warwick Balfour group, Antfactory and three original investors who are now directors of the company.
Headquartered in London, MWB Konnect has already raised £12 million in seed capital and is currently engaged in a second round of funding estimated to be worth about £50 million.
It is understood the company will target Internet customers in Europe and the Republic. But it is unclear how the operation would be able to leverage existing clients of Antfactory.
A spokeswoman for Antfactory said the data hosting enterprise would seek new business rather than simply directing its existing clients to use the centre.
