Google, one of the world's largest Internet search engines and providers of Internet services, has plans to spend €150 million to expand its data centre in Finland as demand rises for online access to video and data. The construction work to expand the facility in Hamina, about 150 kilometers east of Helsinki, will last about 18 months,the company said.

Google is said to need more data centre capacity as demand increases for data-intensive services such as its YouTube video website and Gmail. In April, the company said it will spend more than US$300 million building its largest Asian data centre in Taiwan, after announcing smaller centres in Hong Kong and Singapore in September. Also in April, the comapny announced that it is investing US$300 million in building another data centre in Council Bluffs, Iowa.

In 2009, Google said it planned to invest an initial €160 million to set up the Hamina facility in a former newsprint mill - Google’s first conversion of an existing building into a data centre. The company paid Stora Enso €40 million for the paper mill, which was partly designed by Finnish architect Alvar Aalto.

The data centre opened last September is built on the Baltic Sea and uses sea water as a cooling agent and wind-generated electricity.