Abandoned Finland Mill Goes Google Digital

For Data Center, Google Goes for the Cold WSJ

Unlike America’s tea party members, AOC doesn’t throw off the success stories of the Scandinavian economies as a bunch of lies by socialist communists. We believe Scandinavia has much to teach us about definitions of success and human wellbeing in the modern world.

God didn’t have much to do with Google’s decision to open a $273 million server in Hamina, Finland over the weekend. If you believe in goddesses, then perhaps Mother Nature was operating in Findland’s favor, with its cold climate. As for low electricity prices, she was not involved to the best of our knowledge.

Google’s new data center is located in an old paper ill on the Baltic coast of Finland. The move to digital and the strong environmental ethic in Scandinavia had a major effect on demand in the paper industry. When paper manufacturer Stora Enso Oyj closed down the mill in 2008, Google seized the opportunity to retrofit the strucuture as a new data center.

“When building a data center, there are a whole bunch of cost items involved. These include the cost of land, the actual building and the server equipment. But what has been the main focal point in recent years is the cost of cooling servers,” says Al Verney, a spokesman at Google Benelux.

Data centers now account for 1.5% of the world’s energy usage. Internet traffic is expected to increase four-fold in the next five years.