I can't see it on Google Street View, unless it's that area of tents on the map. But I don't see anything that looks like a paper mill there.

Maybe they just dropped the marker in a random location.

Edit: Yes they did, here's an actual Google Maps link: http://maps.google.com/maps?t=h&q=60.536944,27.116944...

The street view doesn't show the location, just a guarded gate into the area.

Here's a Finnish Wikipedia article about the site (with the coordinates): http://fi.wikipedia.org/wiki/Summan_paperitehdas

And Google Images of the site: http://www.google.fi/images?um=1&tbs=isch:1&sa=1&...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia#Pre-telecommunications_er...

Just out of curiosity, is this were you found out about it?

And here's the first logo of Nokia. It's quite, uhm, interesting compared to what they're doing at the moment, wouldn't you agree http://www.about-nokia.com/images/nokia-logo1.jpg

Google Maps says Hamina is a 2 hour drive from Helsinki, can any Finns comment on if this is an accurate time? Or is it one of those 6 months of the year the roads are dead sort of thing?

It's hardly some dirt road in the middle of nowhere, so yes, 2 hours is probably accurate.

I have been closely following the news about this particular datacenter and it really is strange that Google hasn't found enough engineers for the job there. I have been seeing the ads for the jobs at Hamina datacentre since last one year or so.

Besides they must have thought the name Google is enough to get smart people where ever they want.

btw this is what centre of Hamina looks like : http://torikamera.haminetti.net/user/toricam.html

Plus as the article says - this is really the St. Petersburg/Stalingrad/Leningrad data center without the political problems of having to keep renaming it.

http://www.google.com/datacenter/lenoir/jobs.html

  [We will be] taking the heat outside of the building and 
  using cold [sea] water to remove it

This is also pertinent: http://www.zdnet.com/blog/datacenter/how-to-kill-the-datacen...

It's quite remote from a get-servers-and-techs there perspective too, though. Might not get a 4 hour onsite warranty as easily.

Small country, where do you hire a lawyer with expertise in Icelandic IP law? How much jurisprudence is there?

Do you trust the government given that they just basically walked away from their bank guarantees

It seems this only shifts their heat dissipation problem from having to cool servers to having to cool large quantities of sea water. Perhaps the latter is an easier problem to solve (gigantic outdoor cooling tubs?) but I don't know.

Of course they are. Direct ocean cooling is common for power plants much larger than a data center, and the effect on water temperatures overall is trivial.

For some perspective. This data center may produce 10^7-10^8 watts of heat. A power plant may produce 10^9-10^10 W. The solar heating of the Baltic sea is 3x10^13 W. (337,000 km^2 x 100 W/m^2)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Insolation.png

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baltic_Sea

Update: I should add that I'm all for environmental study to make sure that they aren't venting it out in a sensitive ecosystem or at a radically different temp. Done correctly this can be an important development towards sustainable data centers.

Besides, it's already quite contaminated so there is a lot of environmental protection going around it.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/eb/BalticSea...

As you can see, there really isn't places for the water to flow back and forth, so it's not a case of "the ocean is going to handle it"

Always consider the context.

However, the world as it stands now is going to have data centers, and these take energy. Direct environmental cooling undoubtedly has less of an impact than producing energy, powering a compressor, and using that to cool circulated air. Think of the relative number energy conversions (0 vs 2+).

No, they are discharging heat into the sea. Their outlet water is "nearly the same temperature" because the amount of water involved is immense (the article says the seawater intake is 2 meters wide). A large amount of heat, divided over a very large water flow, is diluted into a small temperature increase.

I am impressed at Google putting datacenters in cold climates for cheaper cooling. You know they have enough datacenters and custom software that they can migrate heavy compute jobs around the planet, keeping them running in night regions where the temperature is lower and cooling cheaper?