Google to invest another $180 million to expand datacenter in Finland

Citing the increased demand for online access to video and data Google has announced a $184 million expansion project for its Hamina Datacenter. The data center in Finland, Google’s first to repurpose an existing, non-datacenter facility, is possibly best known for an innovative cooling scheme that uses seawater from the Bay of Finland to reduce cooling costs.

The announcement of the major expansion plans in Finland are the first  datacenter growth expenditures that Google has announced since the unveiling of plans to build large Asian data centers in Singapore and Hong Kong.

This expenditure roughly doubles the Google datacenter investment in this European facility. After purchasing the paper mill property for 40 million euros, Google spent an addition 160 million euros ($195 million) on building and equipping the datacenter. The original building project took just over 18 months which is also the projected length of the datacenter expansion.