Google invests a further €150 million in Finnish data centres following a visit by President Sauli Niinistö at Google's Hamina server hall.
The investment will expand the Hamina facility by effectively doubling the site's footprint.
The building housing the Hamina server hall was a part of a 56-year old paper mill Google bought from paper maker Stora Enso for around $52m back in 2009. It has underground tunnels running into the Baltic Sea-- creating an ideal cooling system using cold water from the Gulf of Finland.
The expansion will take over a 2nd mill building, what was once the machine hall. It will also use the sea-cooling system.
Google is not the only company housing data centres in the frigid North, of course. Facebook is working on a data centre in Luleå, Sweden, among others.
Why house servers in the Nordic countries? Two reasons-- cheap-as-free cooling and geographical proximity to the Russian market.
