Google's Green Seawater Cooled Data Center Goes Live in Finland

Google's most advanced data center yet went live over the weekend. It's one of the company's biggest in Europe yet and it's one of the most energy efficient, but that's not what sets it apart.

The new data center in Hamina, Finland is Google's first water cooled data center. Because of the original cooling system, the new data center is one of the greenest yet at the company.

Google prides itself on its green operations and puts great effort into cutting down energy use as much as possible and using renewable energy for the power it does need.

Google spent €200 million ($273 million) for its new data center and two years converting an old paper mill factory into a state-of-the-art data center.

And it was well worth it, the company will save a lot of money on energy bills thanks to the use of seawater for the cooling and the colder climate in the area.

Google chose the site of an old paper mill that shut down in 2008 due to lack of demand. The mill already had a huge seawater cooling system built, to keep the machinery cold.

Now, Google has converted the cooling system to keep its thousands of servers from overheating. Google used a water-to-water exchange in the data center and relies on the low ambient temperature to do most of the cooling.

Google uses as much energy as 200,000 American households each year. It tries to rely on green energy whenever possible, but that's only expected to account for 35 percent of its requirements this year.

The best solution is to try to keep its energy bill and consumption as low as possible. A large part of the bill for any data center comes from the power required to keep cool thousands of processors working at capacity, which is why systems that rely on the environment rather than active cooling are preferred.