In the middle of a scrubby business park on the outskirts of Dublin, a hulking grey building has recently sprung up. It is protected by high, spiked railings and two sets of steel security barriers that are thick enough to stop a tank. There is no name above the door, but this 303,000 sq ft industrial building is Microsoft's new mega data centre, its first large-scale computing facility in Europe, representing an investment of $500m (￡300m, €335m).
Inside, thousands of servers wink small lights and hum in orderly rows in the dark, cavernous cool of the building, serviced by 30 or so human attendants. The football pitch-sized server halls, high ceilings and lifts big enough for a forklift truck are not sized for people. This is a cathedral to machines.
As Microsoft likes to put it, the internet – at least in part – lives here. Some 250 of the company's web-based services, including the Bing search engine, Hotmail and MSN Messenger, are run from the facility.