Tech giant Google has announced plans to invest €1 billion ($1.1 billion) to expand its main data centre in Finland due to the location’s access to green energy.
Google’s global head of infrastructure strategy, Ben Townsend, confirmed the investment plans in a media release on Monday.
The cloud computing division of parent firm Google, Google Cloud, with an annual run rate of nearly $38 billion, serves as the hub for all of Google’s AI initiatives, including partner programmes and new AI products.
By 2030, all offices and data centres operated by the massive search engine company will be powered entirely by renewable energy, Google had earlier reported.
Google is perfectly situated to move closer to its goal at the developing data centre, which is situated in Hamina, an area on Finland’s south coast with an abundance of renewable energy sources.
“It may start to steer new site selection opportunities to locations where waste heat recovery and district heating is more readily implementable,” Townsend said.
Reacting to the investment plans in the city, Ilari Soosalu, the Mayor of Hamina said: “Google and the city of Hamina have a long and flourishing history together. Google is an excellent example of a company with a strong sustainable future orientation. It feels good to be the hometown of Google in Finland.”
Explaining the process of heat recovery to operate the data centres, Townsend said: “Heat coming out of our Finnish data centre will be re-routed and provided free of charge by us to the district heating network in nearby Hamina, covering local households, schools and public service buildings.”
We earlier reported that Google has revealed a sneak peek at its next annual I/O conference, revealing that its Gemini AI has picked up some new skills.
The Gemini AI models developed by Google and their integration with Workspace and Chrome were major topics of discussion throughout the event.