Google's new data center in Hamina, Finland, will be cooled exclusively with sea water, a side benefit from the location and previous use of the facility.

The data center is situated in a former paper mill built in the 1950s by the Gulf of Finland.

"Our team was really anxious to utilize the opportunities of it being right near the gulf to come up with an innovative and very efficient cooling system," Joe Kava, Google's senior director of datacenter construction and operations, said in a video (below) posted by Google.

Using existing tunnels connected to the facility, Google will bring in cool sea water, run it through heat exchangers to disperse the heat from the servers, and then mix that warm water with cold water so its around the same temperature as the water where it's returned to.

Google plans to move the data center into operational status through the rest of the year.

Using the unique characteristics of a site is nothing new to Google in its work to make its data centers as efficient as possible. A data center in Saint-Ghislain, Belgium, was built without chillers since it's in an area with year-round lower temperatures than inside Google's data centers.

That allows Google to use outside air for cooling, which has helped make the location Google's top performing data center in terms of energy efficiency.

_{Gulf of Finland - CC license by villemk/Flickr}