Back in 2009, search engine giant Google (News - Alert) bought the former mill owned by paper maker Stora Enso Oyj in Finland for about $52 million and turned it into a data center, using seawater from the Baltic Sea as part of the cooling system. The center began its operations back in September 2011. Now a little less than a year later, the company revealed that it will be expanding its Finnish data center.

Stating it will spend an additional 150 million euros ($184 million) to build a second computing facility in southern Finland, the investment comes as part of an effort to meet increased demand for its Web services. This plan is also a way to compete better against other large tech companies such as Apple, Amazon, Facebook (News - Alert), and Microsoft.

The project is estimated to take about 18 months to complete and will add about 25 jobs to the staff’s current workforce of 90, in addition to the approximately 500 jobs it will create for construction.

“The Internet has become an integral part of society and — as businesses move online — a key driver of economic growth and jobs,” read a statement from Google data center manager, Dieter Kern.

“When someone tells you we’ve selected the next data center site and it’s a paper mill built back in 1953, your first reaction might be: ‘What the hell are you talking about?’,” Google data center man Joe Kava said in reference to the undertaking of the project. “‘How am I going to make that a data center?’ But we were actually excited to learn that the mill used sea water for cooling…. We wanted to make this as green a facility as possible and reusing existing infrastructure is a big part of that.”

Kava and his team engineered the ocean water coolant system which will also be implemented in the second facility as construction begins in the coming months.

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