Google Builds MegaData Center in Finland

Google, like the Energizer bunny, it keeps going and going. This furious growth means the company needs more and more data center space. It needs places with ample electricity supply, good connectivity and wide open spaces, whether that’s the Pacific Northwest in the U.S., or some port in the Netherlands. Now comes news that the company has purchased an old paper mill in Hamina, Finland and is building a new data center dedicated to Nordic nations and Eastern Europe.

Given the proliferation of high-speed broadband and new wireless broadband networks, the residents of Nordic nations can be among the most demanding. It will also be a good place for Google to serve the needs of fast-growing markets in Russia and parts of Eastern Europe. (Related: The Green Data Center Strategies of Web Giants.)

Pingdom collated some details about this data center:

• It will be housed in a paper mill was bought in the first quarter of 2009 for $52 million.
• It’s going to cost $260 million before any hardware is put into two server halls and will go live in spring 2011.
• The entire data center is cooled by using seawater from the Baltic Sea.

Google writes about the data center on the Google blog:

Google is very happy to be constructing a new data center in Hamina, Finland. When fully developed, this facility will be a critical part of our infrastructure for many years to come. Limited testing of the facility should be underway in 2010 and the center should be fully operational later that year. Eventually, we plan to employ approximately 50 people, ranging from Linux system administrators and experienced data center managers to security contractors and technology assistants. We’re confident this EUR200 million investment will be good for Hamina, Google and our Internet users.