Helsinki (AFP) – Google will invest at least 13 billion euros in data centres and other digital infrastructure to power its AI ambitions in Finland, in what the US tech giant called Wednesday its biggest single investment in Europe. The $15 billion plan also calls for clean energy projects over the next two years, which Google said was “a testament to Finland’s leadership in responsibly building AI infrastructure”. It will partner with Finnish companies and four municipalities across the country: Hamina, Kajaani, Muhos and Vaala. The buildout aims to power several of the tech giant’s services, including its AI chatbot Gemini.
“This investment is historical in Finland,” the country’s Prime Minister Petteri Orpo told AFP after a press conference. He called it a sign that “we have done the right things in Finland,” citing investments in the power grid, electricity production, and the labour force. “This makes us a front-runner in digitalisation and AI,” Orpo said. Since buying a former paper mill and transforming it into a data centre in the coastal city of Hamina in 2009, Google has steadily increased its presence in the country.
Antti Jarvinen, the company’s director for Finland, said the Hamina site had already been expanded seven times and currently housed seven data centres. “Now we are building more in Hamina, expanding that site on a remarkable level, and we are opening up data centre operations in three new locations in the municipalities of Kajaani, Muhos and Vaala,” Jarvinen told AFP. He said the final numbers on how many new data centres would emerge were expected in the coming months.
The construction phase of the new investments is expected for 2027 and 2028, and Google estimated it would boost Finland’s GDP by 3.6 billion euros annually and “support more than 37,000 jobs”. Around 16,000 of these jobs will be in the construction sector. After the construction phase, running the new operations will support around 7,000 direct and indirect jobs annually, Google said.
With its cool climate and relatively stable and cheap electricity thanks to nuclear plants, as well as extensive wind and hydro power, Finland has seen a boom in data centres in recent years, with dozens already under construction. Attracting investments in the sector has been a priority for Orpo’s right-wing government as the Nordic country grapples with record-high unemployment and sluggish economic growth. The boom in data centres is expected to rapidly increase power consumption, with the network operator Fingrid forecasting a 40 percent jump in the coming years.
The massive power drain has sparked concern about environmental risks as well as soaring energy costs for Finnish households. And Finland’s Security and Intelligence Service (Supo) recently warned that foreign-owned data centres could raise security risks. Finnish utility Fortum announced Wednesday that it had signed a 22-year deal to supply power to Google, allowing it to “continue operating the Loviisa nuclear power plant until the end of its operating licenses in 2050”. Without that financing, the plant — which currently supplies about 10 percent of Finland’s electricity — would not have been able to continue operations past 2030, Fortum said.
© 2024 AFP
