Google Buys Finnish Newsprint Mill To Build A Data Center
This story was written by Robert Andrews.
Google's cloud is crossing the Atlantic. The search site is buying a paper mill at Summa, Hamina, in southeastern Finland for 40 million ($51.6 million). What's Google (NSDQ: GOOG) want with a dead-tree processing factory? "We are currently considering to build a data center at this site," a spokesperson told Reuters.
Google has around 40+ server farms around the world and over a dozen in Europe, including London, Dublin, Paris, Berlin and Milan. As it crawls more web pages and ups its commitment to cloud-hosted apps, so it needs server capacity. Many server farms reside next to lakes, providing access to cheap hydro-powered electricity; Hamina, nestled on the Baltic coast, is the ideal location, with nearly half of its area taken up by water.
Google is buying the site from local paper company Stora Enso and there's a salutary tale of the ages in the factory's transfer - the outfit decided in 2007 to offload Summa and two other paper mills due to "excess capacity in newsprint and magazine paper" resulting in "persistent losses in recent years and poor long-term profitability prospects" (ie. the decline of print media). The company shed 985 staff across the sites and 485 from Summa alone. Now the site will be used by a company some say is competing with those same newspaper and magazine businesses.
Ernst & Young led the search for buyers, with the company having said it wanted to find new proprietors that would "establish economically viable businesses which will create new employment without competing with Stora Enso". Google isn't using all of the site. part of which is being transferred to the City of Hamina for other industrial uses". The acquisition is due to complete at the end of Q1. Release.
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By Robert Andrews