DUBLIN, May 8 (Xinhua) -- A ground-breaking ceremony for the expansion of Goolge's data center in Ireland was held here on Tuesday, according to the Irish Department of Business, Enterprise and Innovation (DBEI).

The 150-million-euro (178 million U.S. dollars) expansion project will bring to 1 billion euros the total investment of Google in Ireland since it first opened an office in Dublin in 2003, said the DBEI in a press release.

Construction of the project will take 16 months and the project will create about 400 temporary jobs at peak during its construction and around 40 jobs after its completion, said the press release.

Addressing the ceremony held at Google Ireland Data Center located to the west of Dublin, DBEI minister Heather Humphreys said: "This is a considerable vote of confidence in Ireland as a place to do business. This development is also an endorsement of our country's technical expertise and infrastructure."

Denis Browne, Google's EU Regional Data Center Lead, said: "Dublin is a key site in our family of European data centers, which provide the critical infrastructure to keep cloud-based services such as Gmail, Maps, and YouTube running efficiently across Europe, Middle East and Africa."

A report released on Tuesday by Copenhagen Economics said that between 2011 and 2017, Google made a total direct investment of 350 million euros in the construction and operations of its data center in Ireland, annually contributing an average of 55 million euros to Ireland's economy and an average of 700 jobs to the country respectively.

Currently Google employs over 7,000 people directly and indirectly in Ireland, said the DBEI.

Located in Dublin's Grange Castle, a business park which accommodates a number of multi-national high-tech companies, Google Ireland Data Center consists of two units, one put into operation in 2012 and the other in 2016. The ongoing expansion project is related to the second unit of Google's data center.