Amid the climate change rhetoric sweeping the entire world now, Google is also pledging some of it’s fortune to build a more environmentally friendly data centers in Europe by investing about $3.3 billion in the cause.
This isn’t the first investment Google is making in Europe. Since 2007, the company had generously invested about $7 billion and the company won’t stop but commit to building even more data centers which are environmentally friendly.
The search giant made this known in a blog post where the company’s CEO, Sundar Pichai made it clear that the company was focusing on running these centers on a carbon-free fuels and pointed to being in Finland where he met with the Prime Minister, Antti Rinne to build a sustainable economic development in conjuction with a carbon-free future.
About $600 million will be invested to expand Google’s presence in Hamina, Finland. According to Pichai, ” serves as a model of sustainability and energy efficiency for all of our data centers.” Another update shows that the company already announced 18 new renewable energy deals earlier this week, which encompass a total of 1,600-megawatts in the U.S., South America and Europe.
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In the blog post, Pichai outlined how the new data center projects in Europe would include some of these previously announced projects:
Today I’m announcing that nearly half of the megawatts produced will be here in Europe, through the launch of 10 renewable energy projects. These agreements will spur the construction of more than 1 billion euros in new energy infrastructure in the EU, ranging from a new offshore wind project in Belgium, to five solar energy projects in Denmark, and two wind energy projects in Sweden. In Finland, we are committing to two new wind energy projects that will more than double our renewable energy capacity in the country, and ensure we continue to match almost all of the electricity consumption at our Finnish data center with local carbon-free sources, even as we grow our operations.
Google is also investing in new skills training so that people can have tools to be able to handle the new kind of jobs these data centers will require of them. Previous claims showed that the companynhad trained some 5 million people across Europe for free in crucial digital skills and the company had recently opened a Google Skills Hub in Helsinki.
Google isn’t the only company responding positively to the Global Climate Strike Day whereby people on the face of the planet are coming out to encourage governments and businesses to take drastic changes over climate issues. Jeff Bezos of Amazon had pledged to make Amazon carbon-free in coming years.