Google will invest 3 billion euros ($3.3 billion) to expand its data centres across Europe over the next two years, the company said Friday.

The company’s CEO Sundar Pichai said in a blog post that Google would invest an additional 600 million euros into its Hamina, Finland data center next year, bringing total investment in that site to 2 billion euros.

“Our Hamina data centre is a significant driver of economic growth and opportunity,” Pichai said. “It also serves as a model of sustainability and energy efficiency for all of our data centres.”

Data centres are an important component of cloud computing, where things like data storage and processing are made available over the internet instead of on a local hard drive. They typically use a huge amount of energy, but Google’s Pichai said the company was committed to minimizing its environmental impact.

He said that half of the 1,600 megawatts of renewable energy Google bought in a recent deal would be committed to Europe with the launch of 10 renewable energy projects. Google will create about 1 billion euros’ worth of new infrastructure in the EU, Pichai said.

Cloud is a major battleground for some of the world’s largest technology companies, including Amazon and Microsoft, and Google has been increasingly gaining momentum in the field. The company hired Thomas Kurian to replace Diane Greene as the chief of its cloud business last year.

source: cnbc.com