Google will spend €13bn on data centre infrastructure across four Finnish sites during 2027 and 2028, the company announced today. It is Google's largest single investment in Europe to date. The money covers existing operations in Hamina, where Google has been active since 2009, as well as new developments in Kajaani, Muhos and Vaala.
The financial scale of the project is matched by an equally bold energy strategy. Alongside the data centre buildout, Google has signed a 22-year power purchase agreement with Fortum to support the life extension of the Loviisa nuclear power plant. Loviisa currently supplies around 10% of Finland's electricity. In addition, Google has contracted 629MW of new onshore wind capacity through Valorem and Suomen Hyötytuuli, and is backing a 94MW battery installation near Kajaani expected to come online in late 2027.
These energy deals are not incidental. A hyperscaler does not sign a 22-year nuclear offtake agreement or fund new wind farms simply because it has developed strong opinions about the energy transition. It does so because in the Nordic region, you can no longer assume a grid connection exists for the asking. Denmark has paused new grid connections outright, having found that Europe's cleanest grid could not absorb the additional demand from data centres and electrification. The European Union has spent the past year asking households to shift their electricity use to accommodate growing loads. Bringing your own generation has stopped being a sustainability gesture and has become a condition of entry for large-scale industrial projects.
What Google has not disclosed, however, is how much power its Finnish sites will actually draw. The announcement is precise about the 629MW of wind it is adding but silent on the megawatts the data centres themselves will consume. That omission matters. Without knowing the consumption figure, it is impossible to judge whether the new capacity covers the new demand or merely softens it. The company's past data centre energy use in Finland suggests the load will be substantial, and the new sites in Kajaani, Muhos and Vaala are expected to run high-density computing equipment around the clock. Industry analysts have noted that modern hyperscale facilities can require several hundred megawatts each when fully built out, meaning Google's total demand across four sites could exceed its newly contracted renewable capacity by a wide margin.
The economic figures are similarly generous and similarly one-directional. Google projects that construction will add an average of €3.6bn per year to Finnish GDP during the buildout period. More than 37,000 jobs will be supported, including roughly 16,000 in construction. Once operational, the data centres are expected to sustain around 7,000 continuing jobs, at wages Google says are 24% above the Finnish median. For a country of 5.6 million people, these numbers are substantial. Finland has been steadily building a reputation as a data centre hub, and this investment reinforces that position.
The nuclear component deserves attention in its own right, because it represents a different kind of commitment from a wind contract. A 22-year offtake agreement is longer than the useful economic life of most data centre equipment. It also attaches a technology company to the operating economics of a reactor built in the 1970s. Loviisa, which consists of two Soviet-designed VVER pressurised water reactors, has been generating electricity since the late 1970s and early 1980s. Its life extension requires substantial investment, and having a customer like Google on a long-term contract makes that investment easier to justify. For Google, the deal provides predictable low-carbon power that is already connected to the grid, avoiding the long wait times for new interconnection.
Hyperscale cloud providers have spent the past two years discovering that the only firm, low-carbon power available at the scale they need is nuclear. They have also learned that most of that nuclear capacity is already spoken for by existing utilities and industrial customers. Paying to keep existing plants running is quicker than commissioning new ones and considerably quicker than waiting for small modular reactors, which remain, for now, mostly slideware. The same logic is driving other deals across Europe and the United States, as technology companies compete for finite clean energy resources.
Finland has been assembling its position as a data centre destination for a while. TikTok is building a second data centre there at a cost of €1bn. Nebius, the AI infrastructure company, has been tripling its Nvidia-based computing capacity in the country. The attractions are consistent: cold air for free cooling, cheap and largely low-carbon power, political stability, and a district heating network that will take waste heat off a data centre's hands rather than making it a disposal problem. Google says heat recovery will be built into all its new European facilities, and Finland's extensive district heating systems provide a ready market for that captured heat.
Prime Minister Petteri Orpo called the decision a clear testament to Finland's strengths, a restrained way to describe what is, for a country of Finland's size, a landmark investment. Orpo said: "Finland is an attractive destination for investments, and attracting further investment remains a top priority. Google's decision is a clear testament to our strengths. The value of the data economy extends far beyond direct investment into spurring innovation, research, and development. Deepening our collaboration with Google will deliver lasting benefits for both parties."
Alphabet's president, Ruth Porat, framed the announcement as part of a broader strategy to grow responsibly. She said: "Google is proud to deepen our roots in Finland with the company's largest single investment in Europe, building on more than 15 years of sustained investment in Finland. This investment underscores Google's commitment to grow our presence responsibly, pairing the expansion of our technical infrastructure with new energy capacity, grid enhancements, and energy affordability initiatives."
The pattern emerging in Finland is broader than one company or one country. Nearly two-thirds of Europe's new data centre capacity is now going somewhere other than the traditional big five markets of Frankfurt, London, Amsterdam, Paris and Dublin. Grid connection queues and land constraints in those established hubs have pushed developers toward less congested regions. The Nordics are the main beneficiary of this shift, and the price of entry has become a power plan attached to the planning application. Google's Finnish project, with its complex mix of nuclear, wind, battery storage and heat recovery, may become the template for how hyperscale infrastructure is built in a constrained energy environment.
Source: TNW | Google News