By Business & Finance 
Since Facebook established its EMEA headquarters in Dublin in 2009, it has contributed €165.7m to the Irish economy and supported over 2,000 direct and indirect jobs in Ireland.
First established in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg, social networking giant Facebook has become one of the world’s most recognised brands within a decade. As of Q3 2015, Facebook had 1.55 billion monthly active users and reported revenue for 2013 of over $7.87bn.
Facebook established its EMEA headquarters — its largest office outside of the company’s global headquarters in California — in Dublin in 2009.
In February 2013, Facebook announced plans to create a further 100 jobs – bringing the total number of employees at the company’s Dublin Docklands office to 500.
In January 2016, Facebook announced it will open a new, sustainable data centre in Clonee, Co. Meath.
The data centre is Facebook’s first in Ireland and the facility will become part of the infrastructure that enables billions of Facebook users to communicate on the social media site. The new centre will be one of the most advanced, efficient and sustainable data centres in the world.
At the new data centre, all the racks, servers, and other components have been designed and built from scratch as part of the Open Compute Project, an industry-wide coalition of companies dedicated to creating energy and cost-efficient infrastructure solutions and sharing them as open source.
It will be powered by 100% renewable energy, which will assist in Facebook’s goal of powering 50% of its infrastructure with clean and renewable energy by the end of 2018.
In a statement, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg wrote: “Clonee Data Centre will be one of the most advanced and energy efficient data centres in the world. It will feature the latest server, storage and network designs developed through the Open Compute Project, and will be powered by 100% renewable energy.”
He continued: “One interesting engineering detail is that we’re cooling the facility with outdoor air, but because this is near the Irish Sea we’ll be using an indirect air cooling process to filter the salt from the air. We’re glad to be investing in Ireland, to become a part of the Clonee community, and to continue building the massive infrastructure that connects our global community.”
About the head of Irish operations
Gareth Lambe was appointed head of Facebook Ireland in May 2015, after a career that has seen him rise to become managing director of Pigsback.com, director of Merchant Services EMEA at PayPal, and then director of Advertising Operations EMEA at PayPal.
He joined Facebook in 2011, working as director of advertising operations EMEA and then director of sales planning and operations EMEA, before replacing Sonia Flynn as interim head. He previously served as acting head, in 2013. Lambe has a BComm from UCD and an ACCA diploma in financial management from DIT.
