(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — Search engine giant Yahoo (www.yahoo.com) broke ground Wednesday on its 190,000-square-foot data center in the Lockport Industrial Park in Western New York, just four hours after the town Planning Board approved the addition of an outbuilding to the data center plan.
First announced in June, the $150 million data center are said to create 50 to 100 jobs.
Yahoo data center manager A. D. Robison asked for permission to build a 24-by-36-foot building on the edge of the parking lot in order to hold a fire booster pump and snow-removal equipment.
The storage building and data center will both be prefabricated metal structures.
The Planning Board had previously approved the first phase of the project, which includes three identical rectangular buildings, or wings.
They will be connected by a central hallway to each other and to the administration building set to their right.
The second phase will add another two rectangular wings, with a 24 to 30 feet gap between the two buildings, on the other side of the office building.
Robison said the company plans to hire a private company to remove the snow between the data center’s wings, which he says will be one the greatest challenges in operating the facility. However, Yahoo employees will likely have to do some snow removal workin emergency situations.
The Western New York region designed its own incentive package to convince Yahoo to build the facility in the area, where the New York Power Authority offered 15MW of low-cost hydropower – an incentive that could potentially save the company $100 million over 15 years.
