Microsoft has made a series of new Data Centre announcements. The company has announced that it will be building a new Data Centre in Ireland, and some reports suggests the company is considering building a new data centre near Chicago at Northlake, Illinois with around 440,000 square feet. Microsoft has also confirmed that it will be developing a new Data Centre in the Irkutsk region of Siberia in Russia. The Siberia Data Centre will be connected to the TransTelecom fibre-optic network. The proposed Data Centre will host some 10,000 servers.

ISP American Internet Services (AIS) has announced that it has launched a new 80,000 square feet Data Centre in San Deigo, California located at 9305 Lightwave Avenue in the San Diego Tech Centre. The new facility includes a total of 13 Megawatts of power, some 1,500 tons of cooling, redundant UPS, redundant electricity feeds to separate power stations and N 1 or greater redundancy on all Data Centre and network systems.

Summit Financial Technologies Canada has established a data centre in Vancouver, BC, and is negotiating for a second data centre to be located in Toronto by year's end. The data centres are part of the company's growing infrastructure to support service bureau and resource management delivery of iSpectrum banking system built exclusively for Canadian credit unions. The Vancouver data centre is collocated with Bell Canada and taps directly into the main Internet pipeline for Western Canada.

Green House Data has announced a plan to build the first enterprise class Data Centre facility in Cheyenne, Wyoming. It is to be powered by 100 per cent renewable energy using wind power. The Green House Data building is a facility that claims to be 40-60 per cent more energy efficient than a comparably sized Data Centre. The company has invested in water-side economizers, new IT infrastructure and geothermal cooling systems. The Data Centre is engineered to a 99.9 per cent availability with redundant bandwidth, cooling and power.

Carrier neutral pan European Data Centre company TelecityGroup has begun the fit out of an additional 550 metres of space at its Oliver's Yard Data Centre in London. The space will be available from the first quarter of 2008 and will support applications of up to 1.5kW per square metre. In another move, the company has announced it has achieved Gold Certified Partner status in the Microsoft Partnership programme which means that TelecityGroup will benefit from access to a rich set of benefits including access, training and support from Microsoft.

Sun and a consortium of other businesses are going to lower Blackbox self-contained computing facilities into a Japanese coal mine to set up an underground data centre, using up to 50 percent less power than a groundlevel data centre. The coolant will be ground water and the site's temperature is a constant 15 degrees Celsius (59 degrees Fahrenheit) all year, meaning no air-conditioning will be needed outside the containers. This reduces the energy required for the water chillers, used with surface-level Blackbox containers.