Criteo Launches its Latest Green Energy-Based Data Center in Japan

Criteo , the global technology company powering the world’s marketers with trusted and impactful advertising, today announced its newest data center in Tokyo (Koto-ku). Criteo’s newest data center aims at enhancing ads delivery and performance for its clients and partners in North Asia including Japan and Korea, showing its commitment to better serve the region. In the past 10 years, Criteo has expanded its global server pool from 150 to over 45,000 to meet the ad industry’s growing needs.

“We’re thrilled to launch our eighth global data center and third one in Japan, which is our largest market outside the US,” said Megan Clarken, Chief Executive Officer at Criteo. “Japan has been a key market in APAC for Criteo. Its ad industry has been experiencing positive growth for the eighth consecutive year as seen in Dentsu’s report on Advertising Expenditures in Japan, where total ad spend in Japan was 6.9381 trillion JPY (approx. USD 65.7 billion) in 2019. Rapid increases have been noted for transactions of programmatic ads and Real-Time Bidding (RTB). We continue to diversify our solutions and invest in upgrading our infrastructure and R&D to provide better service and performance to our clients. As a green-energy based data center, it demonstrates our commitment to being a socially responsible company, caring for our environment and society.”

This is Criteo’s third data center in Japan following the first launched in March 2011 and soon the second in 2012 as a result of business fast growth. After migration, it will be Criteo’s largest data center in Asia Pacific (APAC), with the other in Hong Kong focusing on helping South APAC clients. The new data center in Japan will enable advertisers to secure premium ad spaces immediately with more efficient and faster access to publishers’ ad inventories.

The data center was built to allow for high performance with the latest technologies while being sustainable, running on less power and less CO₂ emission. Currently, 84% of consumption energy from Criteo’s data centers are compensated by renewable energy production sources through REC (Renewable Energy Certificates). This is a 9% increase compared to 2018 at 75%.  Criteo has set a goal of using renewable energy to run its data center at 100% capacity in the near future.

The New Data Center Features

This new data center footprint was built on-premise and runs at its core a 400G IP fabric. All servers will be connected using 25Gbps interfaces, allowing faster data access with shorter computing time. The new servers boast 2 – 3x faster and better performance, with one server operating on the equivalent of up to four older servers while offering an optimized QPS per watt ratio. This allows for cost savings due to the need to purchase fewer servers. The new data center uses the latest technology with an improved density per rack and has 400m² of server space.

“Criteo is conscious of its environmental footprint and our IT infrastructure team has always had this in mind as we look at improving our data centers,” said Diarmuid Gill, Criteo Chief Technology Officer. “By using leading technology combined with sustainable practices, our powerful data centers around the world can support up to 2.8 trillion bid requests per week, evaluate over 64 million campaigns per second and accumulate 700 TB data per day.”

Currently, Criteo operates 8 data centers globally and owns up to 45,000 servers in North America, Europe and APAC. The platform utilizes data analysis in the fields of digital performance advertisement. As a global technology company, Criteo continues to show a commitment to provide reliable and effective ad solutions to marketers all over the world.