Google a go: $600M Clarksville data center confirmed

• $600 million facility will help support Google search engine and applications.
• 70 initial jobs will include computer technicians, engineers, electricians.
• Google will bring grants program to boost STEM education, regional digital access.
• Growth of data center will take place over years, not months.

CLARKSVILLE, Tenn. — Google corporate executives officially confirmed their entry into Clarksville-Montgomery County Tuesday morning in an exclusive phone interview with The Leaf-Chronicle.

The company ended all speculation, announcing it has acquired the former Hemlock Semiconductor site in northeastern Montgomery County and will be transforming it into a $600 million data center to serve Google's vast and rapidly growing Internet search engine and overall application capacity.

The news was confirmed to The Leaf-Chronicle first by Joe Kava, Google vice president for Data Center Operations, in a phone interview from his office in Mountain View, Calif.

Kava said the first phase of the company's Clarksville plans will employ about 70 people, including computer technicians and engineers, as well as electricians, mechanics and others specializing in "running a large industrial facility."

Additional phases may be added to the Clarksville data center in years to come, but Kava said he isn't prepared to commit on that possibility just yet.

Kava also said the Clarksville data center will be "one of the world's most efficient and most technically advanced data center campuses."

"The Internet is greatly expanding," Kava said, "and data centers are really the engines of the Internet. We need to increase our capacity to serve the users.

"With that in mind, today we are announcing our 15th global data center in Clarksville-Montgomery County. We are now the proud owners of the former Hemlock Semiconductor site," he said.

Community leaders finally get to welcome Google

In addition to Google's local jobs and investment, the company said local officials will begin working with Google to launch a formal community grants program to support science and technology education, clean energy and access to the Internet in the Clarksville area.

It can sometimes take years to design and begin to operate a data center. Montgomery County's data center is still early in the design phase, and Kava urges a measure of patience from the community for that reason.

But he said the corporate partnerships that Google is planning in Clarksville-Montgomery County will begin almost immediately after the new year, when a Google website providing a clearinghouse of local information about the company and its local role, progress, partnerships and business needs, will be up and running.

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Environment-friendly site

Thanks to an arrangement with TVA, Google said it will also be able to scout new renewable energy projects and work with the regional wholesale power distributor to bring that power onto their electrical grid. Ultimately, Google officials said their goal is to offset 100 percent of their energy use with renewable energy.

Already, Google has signed contracts to purchase more than 2 gigawatts of renewable energy, "equivalent to taking nearly 1 million cars off the road," and making it the largest corporate renewable energy purchaser in the world.

That re-use approach is even part of the 1,300-acre industrial land purchase.

“This (former Hemlock) site comes with the benefits of existing infrastructure, which we plan to reuse and recycle. For example, many of the office buildings will be used for Googlers when the data center is operational,” said Kava. “At the same time, we have room to innovate and grow both as a data center and as a member of the Montgomery County community.

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"We’re excited about the opportunity to experiment with new kinds of technology and design an impressive facility — we can’t wait," he said.

"While opening a data center can take years, we can’t wait to get to the drawing board to design the next Internet engine in our lineup. Good things come to those who wait," he added.

Google currently has data centers in 14 locations on four continents, including Iowa, Georgia, Singapore and Belgium, and recently announced plans to develop a site in Alabama. Clarksville will become home to Google's eighth U.S. data center, its 15th globally.

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State, local leaders thrilled

State and local officials reacted with jubilation Tuesday in prepared comments.

Among them, Gov. Bill Haslam said, “We are grateful for Google’s significant investment in Tennessee and the new jobs that will be created in Montgomery County. This is one of the world’s most well-known brands, so it says a lot for our state that it will soon be home to Google’s eighth U.S. data center.

"We welcome Google to Tennessee and look forward to building a strong partnership with the company in the years to come,” Haslam said

Kava told The Leaf-Chronicle that Montgomery County and the state of Tennessee have been "truly wonderful to work with."

"The people there are excited about what we're doing, and that makes us feel like we're definitely doing the right thing," Kava said.

His Google work teams are directly responsible for designing, building and operating data centers.

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Choosing Clarksville

Kava said Montgomery County offered many of the most-desired attributes on the company's checklist, including a trained and tech-savvy workforce, as well as the right energy infrastructure and pad-ready, developable land. "Montgomery County has most of the menu that we look for. The county and the state worked incredibly hard to make this site work for us."

He said the former Hemlock site has many advantages.

"Our first task will be to do a master plan for the site to, in part, determine everything there that we can re-use. The master planning will be a good exercise for us, because not only is it good business, but also to help us maximize sustainability," Kava said.

Clarksville shouldn't expect a site that mirrors data centers built elsewhere.

"There are no cookie-cutter designs for a Google data center. Each one is different, built to its surroundings and with an emphasis on efficiency and sustainability," he said.

And as far as a timeline, that too will have to wait.

"After the New Year, it will take many months to go through the various and necessary processes, including the permitting process, and right now, it's hard to be specific on a timetable for starting and completing this project, but it would be more in terms of years than months," Kava said.

He said Google officials began hearing about the Clarksville site more than a year ago and began assessing whether the data center would be a good fit.

Google data centers are used to store and manage all of the company's data, ranging from Google search to Gmail and YouTube, and employees keep all of it up and running.

"We look for sites based on a highly skilled, trained workforce, and we found that, within Clarksville-Montgomery County and the greater Clarksville area, that workforce was perfect," Kava said.

Community involvement will begin much more quickly.

"We are going to immediately jump in and be very close members of your community, and part of that will include setting up community grants for STEM education centered around Internet access for education and small businesses," Kava said. "We even do training programs in our data center communities where students learn how to do such previously unimaginable tasks as building computers and servers.

"We'll be partnering with the schools and Austin Peay State University on projects, and we're excited about the role that Fort Campbell plays in the workforce. We hire many veterans," he said.

Buildup to the news

The announcement comes after months of rising speculation about who would be stepping in to replace Hemlock Semiconductor on a sprawling former TVA megasite in northeast Montgomery County. In 2014, Hemlock scrapped its ambitious plan for a $1.2 billion plant after global market conditions spelled its end before production began.

The Leaf-Chronicle has been reporting for several weeks that talks regarding a new industry for the site were ongoing, but officials at the Montgomery County Courthouse and in economic development circles in the Clarksville area remained tight-lipped when it came to naming the prospect or saying anything about the nature or scope of its operations.

Industrial Development Board Executive Director Mike Evans would only say that he and other local officials, and the until-now-undisclosed prospect, were operating under the "tightest non-disclosure agreement that I can remember in my 18 years in this position."

Evans has been involved in attracting numerous industries to the community, including South Korean-owned Hankook Tire, which has launched construction of its plant off International Boulevard, promising up to 1,600 new jobs.

Reach Business Editor Jimmy Settle at 931-245-0247 and on Twitter @settle_leaf.