Google’s datacenter in Hamina, Finland is a green paragon. When a company can pick anywhere for a datacenter, wants to flex its site engineering muscles, designs to minimize its climate impact, and has practically unlimited funds, you get Hamina.
Hamina is a coastal town in southeastern Finland, and leverages the cool Nordic climate for natural cooling. The facility draws cold seawater from the Gulf of Finland, circulates it through heat exchangers to cool the servers, and then returns the warmed water to the sea after passing through a cooling process. This greatly reduces the need for energy-intensive mechanical chillers, contributing to a lower overall carbon footprint.
And just to be cool, the datacenter is housed in a former paper mill.
The datacenter is also powered by renewable energy sources, including wind and solar power. Google has invested heavily in local wind farms to ensure a steady supply of green electricity.
Google recently announced they’re going to spend €1 billion ($1.1 billion) to build out Hamina. They’ll grow staff by 25% to 500.
Google originally spent €200 million. They’ve since invested €1.8 billion. So €2 billion to date, and now another €1 billion. They’re also pioneering a project with the local utility to feed excess heat into the network of pipes that’s used to warm up homes in the area. The technology, called district heating, is not new in parts of northern Europe.
It’d be great if all datacenters could be like Hamina. Indeed, with the AI explosion, it seems to me that the only paths to powering the vast trillion-dollar clusters coming online are either nuclear or being very clever like Hamina.
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