By Dan McCue

GOOSE CREEK -- They came, they said, looking for a site that had everything: ready access to electricity, access to water, a dependable, diverse infrastructure, a supportive business environment and, most importantly, room to grow as the market dictates.

In the end, representatives of Google Inc. said there just wasn’t any question that the 520 acres they’d set their sights on in the Mount Holly Commerce Park satisfied all their needs.

“It was a site that we looked at for a very long time,” said Rhett L. Weiss, Google’s senior team leader for Strategic Development of Global Infrastructure.

“And it wasn’t a decision we made lightly,” he continued. “We wanted to make sure this was a place worthy of a $600 million investment.”

After months of intrigue, Google Inc. has officially announced plans to open a data center in the Mount Holly Commerce Park in Berkeley County.

The revelation ended months of cat-and-mouse with the search engine giant that began last December when an entity called Maguro Enterprises LLC purchased the land for the price of $1 and “other valuable consideration” totaling more than $16.9 million.

Coming out from behind Maguro’s shadow — it was Weiss who came up with the cover name — Google executives went out of their way to be neighborly on April 4, visiting select media outlets, including the Charleston Regional Business Journal, and hosting a “community” barbecue at Cypress Gardens the following day.

The first phase of the data center, which Weiss described as an “environmentally safe and friendly use of the land,” is scheduled to open by the end of the year.

When the entire facility, presently conceived of as two large buildings on a large campus, is built out six to eight months later, it will employ about 200 people, he said.

Barry Schnitt, Google’s spokesman, said jobs created by the facility will be spread over 24 hours, minimizing the facility’s impact on local traffic during peak travel hours.

Of secrecy and server farms
Google’s Goose Creek data center will be one of a network of large service the company operates on the East Coast. In addition to this new site, Google is building a similar facility in Lenior, N.C., and is also considering another South Carolina site just outside of Columbia.

Weiss said the company is continuing to evaluate the site, but like the lead up to the announcement regarding the facility in Goose Creek, the valuation appears to be far more than that.

While he didn’t get into specifics of progress on that site, he did mention both the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and wetland mitigation, two phrases that typically aren’t mentioned until well into the land-planning process.

“What all of these locations have in common is that they are all part of our global infrastructure,” Weiss said. “We began to look more earnestly at the Southeast and South Carolina in particular because it was quickly becoming a tremendous population center.

“You know, when people do a search on Google, that process doesn’t just happen. It has to be processed by a huge server farm, and the closer you are to your users, the faster that process can happen,” he said.

One question that begged to be asked was why Google was so secretive about its interest in the Mount Holly Commerce Park site.

“The reason, simply, is that we are in a very competitive business environment, and in that environment, any kind of expansion is a very sensitive situation,” Weiss said. “If you’re Google, you don’t want to provide Yahoo with information about where you think your customer base is and where it’s growing.

“Who knows, given what they know now, Yahoo might be building a facility right up the road,” he joked.

“The other thing is it’s an industry standard to keep business negotiations confidential, and I think that’s good not just for us, but for the states we want to talk to,” Weiss continued. “If it had gotten out, officially, that Google was actively considering South Carolina, the state would have been hit with all kind of competitive challenges of their own.

“In the end, that’s why we didn’t want anything said until we were sure of what we were going to do,” he said.

Google officials also emphasized that while confidentiality was key, all of the public officials involved in talks with the company fulfilled their legal obligations as the economic development matter progressed.

“They did publicly what they had to do publicly,” Weiss said.