Google set to invest €3 billion in expanding European data centres.

The CEO of Google, Sundar Picha has said the tech giant plans to invest 3 billion euros to expand its data centres across Europe in the next two years.

Pichai said this move will total  the company’s investments in the continent’s infrastructure to 15 billion euros since 2007.

As part of the plan, Google will invest a further 600 million euros in its Hamina facility in Finland, bringing total investment in the site, which was formerly a paper mill, to 2 billion euros.

Mr Pichai met Finnish prime minister Antii Rinne in Helsinki and said the investments will support 13,000 full-time jobs in the European Union every year.

He also noted that Google is investing heavily in renewable energy, an initiative announced ahead of global rallies calling for action to guard against climate change.

At the Hamina site, seawater from the Gulf of Finland is used to reduce the energy needed to cool the facility.

Employees at Google and other big US tech companies such as Amazon and Microsoft planned to participate in the “global climate strike”.

The Google project will include the construction of more than a billion euros in new energy infrastructure in the EU, among them a new offshore wind project in Belgium, five solar energy projects in Denmark, and two wind energy projects in each of Sweden and Finland.

There are also projects in the US and South America.

Mr Pichai said that once these projects come online, Google’s carbon-free energy portfolio will produce more electricity than places like Washington DC or entire countries like Lithuania or Uruguay use each year.