Google’s latest expansion of its data centre complex in Hamina has been approved.
The Regional State Administrative Agency (AVI) of Southern Finland has green-lighted the environmental permit and operating license for the sixth data centre within the complex.
The company says the new centre will be up and running next year. At the moment it is carrying out installation and testing work at the site.
Google plans to hire some 40–50 new employees, bringing the workforce to around 400.
There are now some 1,200 people working on the construction site, a number that is expected to grow to 1,300–1,400 by year’s end.
From paper mill to wind-powered data centre
Last year Google said it would invest 1.2 billion euros more in Hamina for a total of around two billion so far.
The search giant has been expanding its presence in southeast Finland since buying Stora Enso's former Summa paper mill in 2009, opening its first data centre there two years later.
The complex is powered by electricity from three new wind farms, the firm says.
Meanwhile the Russian data search company Yandex plans to double the size of its data centre in Mäntsälä, south-central Finland, the financial paper Talouselämä reports. The Finnish company Ficolo is building a centre in Vantaa while the German firm Hetzner has one in Tuusula and the US firm Equinix has several in the Helsinki region.