Online search engine giant Google will invest another $607 million over the next few years in a data center in Finland.
The investment is in addition to 350 million euros the world’s No. 1 Internet search company has already spent on the data center.
Google is taking advantage of the Bay of Finland’s chilly seawater to cool its servers.
The online company will increase Finland data center staff over the coming years from the present 125 people at the Hamina facility.
Companies such as Facebook and Google have been expanding their data centers and looking for cheaper ways to run them. Finland and other northern European countries have been popular sites for data centers due to cooler climates that help to reduce cooling costs, Reuters reported.
At the Hamina facility, one of around 13 Google data centers in the world, seawater is pumped through the facility to dissipate heat from the data centre’s servers. The water is then cooled down before being returned to the sea.
The increasing use of cloud computing, which allows software and services including email and online music libraries to be offered over the Internet, is seen driving up the use of data center usage in the coming years.
Microsoft has said it will invest more than $250 million in a new data center in Finland.
Yandex, Russia’s biggest search engine, started building a data center in Mantsala, southern Finland, in July.
