Google is set to spend about $670 million to build a data centre in Finland, Bloomberg reported on Monday.
This investment in a new data center comes amid a push by its parent Alphabet to invest heavily in servers and feed demand for faster access to files and media.
The new data centre construction will add to Google’s existing data-centre complex in Hamina on the south coast of Finland, taking the company’s total investment there to 1.4 billion euros.
Google’s other European data centers are located in the Netherlands, Ireland and Belgium.
“The demand for Google services is growing daily and we are building our data center infrastructure to match this demand,” Google’s Finland country head Antti Jarvinen said in a statement.
Tech companies are racing to build more data centre facilities as businesses and individuals increasingly store more data online on so-called cloud platforms. Google offers consumers services including email, maps, search and photos, as well as videos on its YouTube website.
The Mountain View, California-based company currently has 58 data centres around the world. In Europe, Google has invested more than 4.3 billion euros in five such facilities since 2007 and its accrued capital expenditures for the first quarter came to $4.5 billion, comprising spending on data centres, servers and office facilities.
The expansion in Finland comes as Google is pushing into video gaming with its streaming service Stadia, which will allow players to access the action through the web without expensive consoles or personal computers. Stadia runs through the company’s YouTube video-streaming platform and requires the data-centre network to function.
Googles Hamina complex will be powered by renewable energy acquired from three new wind farms in the Nordic nation.
