Confirmed in an announcement on its corporate website, Javier Olivan, VP of Cross-Meta Products and Infrastructure said that the company is putting Spain at the heart of its Metaverse plans through the creation of “new, high skilled jobs, support for local entrepreneurs and tech businesses and investment in vital digital infrastructure”.
Over the next five years, the business plans to hire 2,000 employees in Spain, construct the world’s first Meta Lab, and develop the world’s first half-petabit trans-Atlantic subsea cable. A partnership with Telefónica to open a Metaverse Innovation Hub in Madrid, as well as a new data center in Castilla La Mancha valued at $1.1 billion.
“It’s not just any initiative,” Emiliano Garca-Page, president of Castile-La Mancha, said of the data center proposal, adding that “with a stroke of the pen, we can be using all the industrial area that was left underutilized in Talavera.”
He went on to say that Meta is a “global new-technology behemoth” that has “set its sights on Castilla-La Mancha to extend its network of data centers beyond the two it already has in Sweden and Ireland.” Garca-Page has asked for bipartisan cooperation on this initiative in order to see it through.
Meta Data Centre Campus will sit on a 191-hectare piece of land with the project due for completion in 2023.
The half-petabit trans-Atlantic undersea cable’s details are few, but it will be added to the company’s current Marea subsea cable and the company’s 2Africa subsea cable, a 37,000-kilometer subsea cable system connecting Africa, the Middle East, and Europe that already lands in Spain.
“Our connectivity investments, notably Marea, one of the world’s highest capacity transoceanic cables,” stated Olivan, “will help other IT enterprises, spurring innovation and development across the industry.”
The Meta Lab will serve as a flexible base for the company’s remote workers in Spain
The Meta Lab will provide a flexible base for the company’s remote workers in Spain, as well as extra space for local digital entrepreneurs and small enterprises. The Telefónica-developed Metaverse Innovation Hub will focus on “metaverse network and device readiness.”
Meta has the potential to collaborate with business, academia, and government to build “the metaverse responsibly, especially in terms of privacy, safety, and diversity.”
“Bringing the metaverse to life and discovering new ways for Europeans to engage with one another will necessitate collaboration and coordination among businesses, developers, creators, and policymakers,” Olivan added.
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