Google is setting up its first software engineering team in New Zealand, which will be made up of local recruits and engineers it will be relocating from the United States.
But it may be a while before Google makes a big-dollar investment in New Zealand by building one of its giant power-hungry data centres here.
The company’s senior vice president of cloud infrastructure, Urs Holzle, has explained why New Zealand generating 79 per cent of its power from renewables is not enough to tempt the company into such an investment.
Google NZ country director Caroline Rainsford said the engineering team Google was establishing in Auckland would initially comprise fewer than 20 staff.
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It would first be working on a specific privacy-related project that was a “core project” for the internet giant, she said.
“Google is an engineering company at heart, so this is a huge milestone for New Zealand.”
The company would soon be advertising for “a couple” of recruits, she said.
They would require advanced skills in machine learning or artificial intelligence, she said.
“The hope is we find great New Zealand engineering talent, or potentially Kiwis who want to come home.”
Previously, seeking a more-coveted engineering role with Google generally meant moving to Sydney or the US.
Rainsford said Google was working through the immigration process to secure visas for the engineers it wanted to relocate from the US, with assistance from New Zealand Trade and Enterprise.
The engineering team will be based at Google’s new Auckland headquarters in the Wynyard Quarter, which its existing staff will be moving into on Monday.
Google currently employs 50 staff in Auckland and Wellington, mainly in the likes of sales and support roles.
The new office includes a few “quirks”, such as a reception desk made out of kayaks and a cafeteria modelled on the looks of chilli bin.
Holzle – who has himself decided to relocate to New Zealand from California to work remotely – said that when it came to data centre investments, it was not important to Google what a country’s renewable power mix was.
What was important was where the incremental electricity needed to power a new data centre might come from.
Currently, if Google set up a data centre in New Zealand, the extra power it used would come from coal, he said.
“What matters is what provides the additional power, which unfortunately in New Zealand right now is coal because of the drought.”
Google was able to buy or build renewable generation to power data centres wherever they were set up, he clarified.
Since 2017, Google has committed to match the power demand of any additional cloud computing facilities it sets up with additional sources of renewable electricity.
But that meant the decision on where to locate such facilities came down to factors other than the region’s existing power mix, he said.
Rival Microsoft is making a big investment building data centres in New Zealand to support its Azure cloud service, while Hawaiki Cable chief executive Remi Galasso is planning a giant “green” data centre near Invercargill that he expects to rent out to cloud computing giants.
Galasso has argued New Zealand – and in particularly the deep south – is an inherently more power-efficient base for large data centres than Australia, given the region’s climate, which dramatically reduces data centres’ cooling costs.
But Holzle said picking sites for data centres was “an art of compromise” and implied that, if anything, its philosophy meant already having a lot of green-energy generation could be a drawback.
“You never have a site that scores ‘10 out 10’ on all two or three dozen criteria.”
Google had chosen Melbourne as its next site but how green the Melbourne grid was, was not a factor, he said.
“If renewables aren’t that common yet, hopefully we can be part of creating that momentum and making it easier for other companies to buy renewable energy as well.
“I see that as an opportunity.”
Holzle also announced Google had established a “private-cloud interconnect point in Auckland” which would better connect local customers to its global cloud infrastructure.
Holzle said he was not ready to comment on what kind of visa he had been able to obtain to allow him to move to New Zealand to work remotely.
It is understood he has not applied for citizenship, putting him in a different category to contrarian US technology entrepreneur and Trump supporter Peter Thiel, who was controversially granted New Zealand citizenship in 2011.
“I would love to talk about it at the right time,” Holzle said, indicating that would not be far away.
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