This weekend could Google launch it’s new data center in an old paper mill in Finnish Hamina. There have already been pre considerable attention around the new data center, because the cooling is with water pumped from the sea. The water is retrieved through a tunnel in the rock below the data center and is used to keep the servers cool through heat exchangers. Google has also installed a wind turbine that supplies power to the data center.

Two years ago Google bought the area for just over 55 million dollars of the Swedish group Stora Enso. Overall, Google has invested a total of 280 million dollars in the new data center.

The new data center 150 kilometers east of Helsinki and is also close to the new growth market Russia.

 

Hamina lost 450 jobs after the closure of the paper mill, but in return 50 new jobs has emerged at Google data center.

It is believed that Google has between 900,000 and one million servers - which is about 3 percent of all the world’s servers - and last week Google could for the first time provide figures for power consumption in it’s giant data centers. In the past year, Google’s data centers used 2.26 billion kilowatt-hours. This corresponds to power consumption in a city with 200,000 inhabitants.

 

Google claims that it has the world’s most energy-efficient servers and is constantly experimenting with new technologies. The Company has, among other things built a data center in St. Ghislain near Mons in Belgium that perform entirely without conventional cooling.

The video below shows Google’s new data center in Hamina before the official opening.