Google commits €13bn to Finnish AI data centres and a nuclear supply deal
Three new data centres, an expansion at Hamina, and a 22-year contract for up to half the output of the Loviisa nuclear plant. It is the largest single investment Google has made in Europe.
Google will spend €13bn in Finland on artificial-intelligence infrastructure and has agreed to buy up to half the output of a Finnish nuclear power station to run it, the company announced on Wednesday. It is the largest single investment Google has made in Europe.
The money funds three new data centres, an expansion of an existing one, and energy projects to feed them. The nuclear arrangement is the part that marks a change: a 22-year contract with the utility Fortum for up to 50% of the electricity generated at the Loviisa plant, which currently produces about 10% of Finland's power. A technology company has effectively become a long-term offtaker for a national reactor.
Where the money goes
New sites will be built at Kajaani, Muhos and Vaala. The existing facility at Hamina — converted from a paper mill in 2009 — will be expanded. Construction is scheduled across 2027 and 2028.
Google puts the employment effect at more than 37,000 jobs supported during construction, and estimates the investment will add €3.6bn a year to Finnish GDP. The infrastructure will run consumer-facing products including the Gemini chatbot, along with Search, Maps and YouTube.
The company also said the package covers clean energy projects and dedicated nature and community funds supporting local biodiversity, education, research and workforce development.
"This is Google's largest single investment in Europe and a testament to Finland's leadership in responsibly building AI infrastructure," the company said.
Ruth Porat, president and chief investment officer of Alphabet and Google, framed it as a commitment to grow the company's presence responsibly, pairing new technical infrastructure with new energy capacity, grid work and energy affordability measures.
Why Finland
The case for the location is unglamorous and largely physical. Finland is cold, which cuts the energy needed to cool halls packed with servers. It has plentiful low-carbon electricity. And its power grid is relatively uncongested, which in the current market may be the scarcest of the three.
That combination is drawing others. Earlier this week TikTok announced a $1bn investment to build a data centre at Kouvola, citing the country's digital infrastructure, clean energy mix, data governance and technical workforce. Two announcements of that size in one week, in a country of Finland's population, is not coincidence.
Finland's prime minister, Petteri Orpo, welcomed the decision. "Google's decision is a clear testament to our strengths," he said in a statement, adding that the value of the data economy extends beyond the direct investment into spurring innovation, research and development.
The electricity is the constraint
The detail that will be studied hardest by the rest of the industry is not the €13bn. It is the Fortum contract.
Technology companies building AI capacity have run into the same wall almost everywhere: computing capacity is limited less by chips or capital than by the availability of firm, low-carbon power on a timescale that matches a data centre's construction schedule. Renewables are cheap but intermittent. Grid connections queue for years. Nuclear output is steady, and a reactor already running needs no permitting.
Buying half of Loviisa's production for 22 years solves Google's problem and Fortum's at the same time. The utility said the commitment supports an investment programme aimed at extending the plant's operating life and increasing its generating capacity — a decision that is far easier to take with two decades of contracted demand behind it.
It also raises a question Finland will have to answer politically. A single foreign company contracting for half the output of a station that supplies a tenth of the national grid is a structural change in who has first claim on electricity, and it will be judged against household bills as much as against GDP figures.
The scale behind the announcement
The Finnish commitment sits inside a much larger programme. Earlier this year Alphabet raised its global capital spending plans to as much as $205bn as it expanded computing capacity for AI services, and the company has announced a $15bn AI data hub in India.
Set against that, €13bn in one country is a substantial slice rather than an outlier — which is itself the point. Spending at this level, sustained over years, is now the price of staying in the frontier-model business, and it is being financed on the expectation of demand that has not yet fully arrived.
For Finland the calculation is simpler and the risk is different. The construction jobs are real and the GDP contribution is plausible. Data centres, however, employ comparatively few people once they are running, and the country will be tied to the electricity arrangement long after the builders leave.
What Finland has secured is a customer for a large block of its nuclear output for more than two decades, and the industrial reputation that comes with being chosen. What it has given up is flexibility over a large block of its own generation. Whether that trade looks shrewd will depend less on the AI boom than on what Finnish electricity turns out to be worth in the decades after it.
