In order to fulfill the ever growing demand of data centers (Online Live and Cloud services), Microsoft is opening two more mega data centers this July.

The first one to open (July 1st) is located in Dublin (Ireland) and is the first mega data center Microsoft has built outside of the US. Currently this building covers 303,000 square feet, with 5.4 mega watts of critical power. This will be expanded in the future. Furthermore this building is very energy efficient as it uses outside air to cool the facilities and servers!

The second one is the Chicago Data Center, which will open on July 20th. This facility will be one of the largest data centers in the world measuring no less than 700,000 square feet (approximately 16 football fields)! What else is special about this one? It is the first one to utilize containers as a primary server packaging unit (each container houses 1,800 to 2,500 servers)!

More information can be found in the GFS Team blog post here.