Google announced on Monday that it's building a new data center in the Las Vegas suburb of Henderson.The new data center will help provision Google services in North America such as YouTube, Google Calendar, Gmail and more, as well as boost the cloud computing capabilities of Google Cloud Project (GCP).
Google is also donating $1 million to Las Vegas area non-profit organizations and providing additional support for small and large businesses across the state.
According to a story by LasVegasNow, the data center is expected to create 50 jobs with an average salary of $65,000 a year. Henderson Mayor Debra March said the data center is a $600 million project, according to the same story.
The Henderson data center is slated to come online next year. Google operates 16 data centers globally, and its Google Cloud customers are served by 20 cloud regions and 61 availability zones around the world.
The Henderson region will have three availability zones and will support Google Cloud Project's portfolio of products, according to a blog post by GCP's Tariq Shaukat, president, partner and industry platforms.
According to a story by the Las Vegas Review-Journal, the Nevada Governor’s Office of Economic Development approved $25.2 million in tax abatements late last year for Design LLC, which is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Google, to build the data center on 64 acres of land.
Google is a Mecca for high-speed data services and data consumption due to the casinos and conference center facilities throughout the area. The Las Vegas area is home to more than two million residents as well as the booming gaming and entertainment industries.
Cox Business has been the local provider in the Las Vegas area for many years, but Caesars Entertainment Corporation uses Google Cloud's Big Query serverless data warehouse and TensorFlow machine learning framework to aggregate data and create insights from Caesars' 40,000 hotel rooms around the globe.
“Caesars Entertainment selected Google Cloud because we depend on highly reliable performance as well as scalability for our data analytics initiatives,” said Caesars Entertainment's Gene Lee, senior vice president and chief analytics officer, in a statement. “The addition of a Google Cloud region in Las Vegas, combined with the sophisticated capabilities of BigQuery and TensorFlow, should enable Caesars to further differentiate the gaming, hospitality and entertainment experiences we are able to offer to individual guests."
RELATED: Google pours $600 million into Oklahoma data center expansion
Last month, Google CEO Google CEO Sundar Pichai went to Oklahoma to announce the $300 million expansion of the company's Mayes County data center.
Google announced a $13 billion U.S. investment plan for its data centers and offices in February. The company has major expansions slated this year across 14 states. Google has offices and facilities in 24 states, including data centers in 13 communities. From 2016 to 2018, Google has spent a total of $47 billion on capex, including investments in its infrastructure.