Google Unveils World's First Seawater-Cooled Data Center

Google is very concerned about its carbon footprint and is looking at various ways it can have a smaller impact on the environment. One way is by investing in green energy projects, ensuring that the energy its data centers consume is clean, coming from a renewable source.

But that's just one half of the equation, equally important is having more efficient data centers, ensuring that they don't need too much energy in the first place.

One of the latest examples of the ways Google designs its data centers to minimize impact is one of its latest projects in Hamina, Finland. Google plans to open a large facility there, to serve the area, and has used the unique advantages of the location to come up with an interesting solution for cooling the thousands of servers, seawater.

Google bought a former paper mill and converted it to a data center location. The building is located right near the sea, so the Google team decided to use seawater for cooling.

Since the facility already had piping to get the water into the mill and back out, Google used that as part of its solution. This is the first time a data center has been cooled using seawater, so Google had a lot of testing and experimenting to do.

The data center uses heat transfer units for cooling, nothing too special about that, but the cooling agent is seawater pumped from several hundred meters away.

Google pumps water into the heat transfer units, which are made out of titanium to prevent corrosion from the salt water. The water is then carried to another building, where it's mixed with cold seawater to get its temperature close to that of the environment before pumping it back into the sea.

It's a more extravagant solution, but it made economical sense because of the size of the site, it's one of Google's biggest data centers.