Google greens data centre

Google plans to use sea water for cooling its new data centre in Finland, reports IT Pro Portal.

The data centre, which used to be a paper mill before Google purchased it in 2009, is believed to be a part of the company's growing focus on the cloud computing sector and the use of greener technology.

According to a video available from The Register, Google runs sea water to the facility through a tunnel that was built for the Summa paper mill as far back as the 1950s.

The water, says Google senior director of data center construction, Joe Kava, is run through a heat exchanger, where it is used to dissipate heat from the facility's servers.

However, Reuters says the seawater-cooled data centre is unusual even for Google, a pioneer of experimental technology, which builds its own servers, experiments with making solar thermal receivers and created a subsidiary to buy and sell energy on the wholesale electricity markets.