GOOGLE TO INVEST $672M IN FINLAND

Google Cloud has disclosed plans to invest about €600 million ($672 million) in a new Finnish data center. The new facility is to be sited in Hamina, Finland.

The new facility will be Google’s second in Hamina. The first data center was developed in 2009 when the tech giant invested €800 million to convert an old paper mill which was acquired from Paper firm Stora Enso. The new investment is set to bring Google’s data center CAPEX in Finland to about $1.5 billion.

According to Google, the existing Hamina facility was one of its most advanced and efficient data centers. Its cooling system uses sea-water from the Gulf of Finland to reduce energy consumption.

“The demand for Google services is growing daily and we are building our data center infrastructure to match this demand,” said Antti Jarvinen, Google’s Finland country head.

Currently, the company has 58 data centers in all regions globally and Europe is enjoying about $5 billion of Google’s data center investments since 2007 which cut across Finland, the Netherlands, Ireland, Denmark and Belgium. The tech giant also runs cloud regions in the UK, Germany and Switzerland.

Google is on a quest to expand its footprint to meet global demands and of course, this new investment ups the company’s game against rivals AWS and Microsoft who are also spreading their portfolios at an enviable pace.

According to Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian, the company has invested more than $47 billion in its global infrastructure in the last three years. Recently, the company announced its plans to invest $13 billion in 2019 for U.S data centers and offices alone, up from the $9 billion it spent last year.

More details of the new Finnish facility wasn’t disclosed, however, the facility may at least use same cooling system as the existing one, due to its proximity to the Gulf of Finland.