> As part of the deal, Google signed a 22-year contract with Finnish utility Fortum to buy up to 50% of the output from the Loviisa nuclear power plant.
> Finland has emerged as an attractive location for data centres because of its cool climate, plentiful low-carbon electricity and relatively uncongested power grid.
I hope the data center's waste heat can be used for some form of district heating! Finland has pretty great municipal infrastructure, but I don't know enough about its heating systems.
At least Sweden is struggling a lot with scaling its power production, to the point where it's a problem for existing and new industries and causing some rather extreme price volatility.
A lot of the green energy is from hydro dams and you can't really add new rivers to the geography to support additional industry.
The plant may be closed without this Google's order. The cost to keep it running is substantial. I guess that's what you prefer?
"The Finland deal will ensure that the Loviisa plant keeps operating beyond 2030, the companies said in a statement. Keeping it running until 2050 will require about €1 billion of investments over the years"
Why does it matter that homes "aren't clean" while Google is? That's silly. There's going to be the same level of demand no matter what - the same mix of coal and nuclear inputs will happen regardless of where the outflows are. It's fungible.
More demand will in time result in an increase in supply. That's a good thing. We'll be building a lot more, and it's long overdue.
Google is buying the output because they are increasing demand by half a nuclear power plant's worth of power. I actually think it's pretty reasonable to pass a law demanding they build an entire nuclear power plant here.
"The agreement with Fortum provides long-term financial certainty for the Loviisa plant, which currently generates about 10% of Finland's electricity.
Fortum said Google's commitment would support an investment programme aimed at extending the life of the nuclear station and increasing its generating capacity."
Long-term PPAs are what you usually want because they are bankable and give you solid demand on which to expand. Which is literally what they're talking about doing.
If I build a house and the demand goes up I don't have to build the solar panels (and everything else involved) to cover it, I pay the utility company to build that based on how much I'm needing to use. Well, normally I pay for whatever they think will make them the most money to deliver that much electricity - Google is specifically paying to make sure they see the utility company sees it as increased demand and revenue for more nuclear.
At this point with all the free-market-hand waving going around, it feels like someone telling me that it's not urin raining down on me, just sparkling trickle down economics.
King Richard II would have killed for an iPhone, PS5, air conditioning, and Uber Eats. He'd swap places with you, and he was king. You don't realize how awesome you have it.
Just a hundred years ago your ancestors were (probably) eating rotten meat and drinking unclean water.
It's such an incredibly shallow way of looking at very complicated history, I wouldn't even know where to start. There is nothing worth arguing in their comment. It sounds like what young people nowadays call "NPC" I guess.
You’re assuming a large enough supply that can absorb demand. This is true in China but not generally in the West.
If supply was just in time constructed so you maybe have only like 10-30% extra vs peak, the 50% of a nuclear power plant shifts the preexisting non-Google demand onto the non-nuclear sources as the plant can no longer meet its non-Google demand. It’s generally no different than if Google acquired that electricity from the available mix rather than the plant directly.
The thing it gives them is the ability to meet their individual net-0 targets (and thus government incentives) - a local optimization at the cost of a global net negative (at least as far as carbon electricity sources goes)
This is a case where the supply was about to be gone and Google provided funds to keep it operating (the original nuclear reactor began operation in 1977 and it now needed EUR 700M to extend the service life). And one can probably guess that this supply just wasn’t cost competitive in the first place, but Google increased the demand so much that it now becomes cost competitive.
Somehow folks want this little problem of climate change to go away without any change in their own behaviors. Somehow corporations who sell them goods will just magically "be green" while flying around the world and drinking out of plastic bottles and subscribing to the latest fast-fashion website. But then when the corporations say "yes we should be green" that's a problem too. You just can't please some people, they're just here to complain, not actually see anything positive in the world.
Per capita is worse by definition, unless your arguing that people with higher per capita emissions are somehow more valuable to society than those with lower.
The other aspect is that China provides a large industrial base for the West, which is arguably the West just externalizing/offshoring their emissions anyway.
It’s unclear. It helps Google with their marketing that they’re a net zero carbon company. But if what’s happening is they’re displacing previous nuclear power users onto dirtier, that’s not really reducing carbon and it’s making it seem like Google isn’t the problem when it actually is - without them that community might otherwise be 100% nuclear and it would be no different from a macro level from Google adding that consumption to dirty sources.
> But if what’s happening is they’re displacing previous nuclear power users onto dirtier, that’s not really reducing carbon
That's not the case, because in EU (and thus Finland) electric production is under cap-and-trade. There is just no way to increase dirty electricity production in EU. Apart from political pressure to change rules, which for example Italy is doing because Italy built their grid on gas...
It's a good thing that green energy isn't a fixed quantity and more can be built if there's demand, which is exactly what Google is doing.
It's great for marketing and, you're right, that's why they are doing it but the reason it's good for marketing is that their customers care about the environment. This is the exact invisible hand mechanism in action. It's their preferences changing the behavior of one of the biggest corporations in the world and all they can do is act like it doesn't count because they don't actually care
Nuclear is the most expensive form of clean energy. It is likely to bankrupt at least one company.
When Finland contracted with France to build their latest reactor, they wisely had a fixed price contract where the French company would pay for const overruns. At groundbreaking in 2005, they planned for a 2009 completion. In 2016 it bankrupted Areva, with the French government owned EDG saving parts of the company crucial to the nation. It wasn't completed u tip 2023:
When the US last decided to build nuclear, Westinghouse AP1000s, two in South Carolina and two in Georgia, it resulted in the bankruptcy on Westinghouse, putting all of Toshiba, its owner, at risk:
The two South Carolina reactors were abandoned at the cost of a substantial fraction of the build cost, in the billions, and utility executives went to jail for deception about it. Georgia finished its two reactors, but only by creating some of the most expensive electricity out there today.
Storage and renewables are cheaper, faster to deploy, and work really really really well in Texas and Arizona. Despite nearly free natural gas in Texas due its state as a by-product of oil extraction, most of the new electricity grid assets in Texas are wind, storage, and solar, and that's independent third party investors making those choice in the grid to make money, as Texas has perhaps the "freest" electricity market in the United States when it comes to who is allowed to build grid assets and make money off them.
If the far north places have hydro that's already built and not being used, that makes sense for data centers. But new nuclear is not a serious technology, it exists mostly based on vibes.
Arizona is conducive to abundant solar power, so that'd be a good reason to build there. Similar deal here in Nevada (with the added bonus of Nevada being a giant blob of geothermal heat, further driving renewable energy supply and therefore datacenter attractiveness).
Perhaps the extra cost in freeze proofing certain systems and the inability to rely on evaporative cooling techniques? The availability of power in the winter might be a problem too when northern home's power and energy usage all ramp up. In the summer you need nearly the same amount of capacity for cooling as the south so there isn't much savings there.
Republican south states have also decided to reject science and embrace fossil fuels - global warming shall be the problem of our grandchildren, feel free to build as many gas turbines as you wish!
The company my brother works for (fairly small) is involved in the construction and maintenance of the electrical side of the data grid. Apparently they need to hire at least 20 people a month for the foreseeable future to keep up with demand, as they're already booked out with projects into 2030 or something like that.
Overall, it's not exactly a ton of jobs for how much money is going into them, but it isn't nothing.
> Overall, it's not exactly a ton of jobs for how much money is going into them, but it isn't nothing.
I’m not disputing that data center buildouts will have some localized job creation, but the net effect of all those data centers will be overwhelmingly negative on employment if everything the AI companies are saying is true
Google claims that 10% of its power goes to non-computing overhead. Even if that were 0 somewhere else, ok how much more expensive is the power in that area, probably more than 11%. And I don't know how much they spend on power to begin with, relative to the other costs that probably go up.
Which makes Arizona an interesting place to place any new builds of any sort of data center. They’ve been talking about the scarcity of resources there for years, and it’s currently in an escalating tailspin of abundance. Power is cheap as hell there, but once the water dries up… things might change quickly.
There's also a power generation water cost though!
Something like 500g/MWh for gas/coal/nuclear (~70% of power in AZ), so a huge xAI datacenter (Colossus 2, ~1 GW/h) would use ~700 MW of this type, or ~350k gallons of water an hour, which would be 0.2% of the Colorado rivers flow rate last year.
Pulling recent data from the EIA, of the roughly 10,000 megawatts of new power capacity installed in Arizona between 2023 and 2025, 50% is batteries, 40% solar, 6.5% wind, and 3.5% gas. Now, most solar and wind plants rarely if ever hit their nameplate capacity, but it’s pretty clear the large majority of new power generation isn’t consuming water.
https://www.eia.gov/electricity/data/eia860/
Does that change the math above if they're tied into the grid?
If they're tied directly to the renewables (Meta is doing this in some places), then true, not a technical increase. But you could still maybe claim they're instead preventing the equivalent reduction on average/grid (and, say, decommission of some of that coal). I suppose that's a separate point.
Ok, those are truly closed loop. As in, they use ambient cooling or active chillers. I've seen too many cooling tower sites described as closed-loop because the internal system is.
Alaska’s land is pretty rugged and hard to build on. It would be interesting to hear from someone who works in the industry why the Northern Interior states like Montana, North Dakota, and Minnesota have fewer data center buildouts than Texas though.
Sure, but it seems very reasonable to expect some co-hosting of latency sensitive tasks, especially with some low hanging thin client fruit, like cloud gaming and the like. After using cloud hosted computers for a while, I personally think it's the future for most heavy workstations.
Before the American tinfoil-hat data center nuts comes out in force:
- This is a plant that was going to be decommissioned without investment
- Finland is a rational country due to their small size and unfortunate proximity to Russia. They tend to do rational things like invest in good energy infrastructure. Nobody will be losing power due to this deal
- Finland is one of the cleanest/greenest energy markets on earth, and the country is largely a giant unpopulated forest
- Finland currently has the highest unemployment in Europe, this is a great win for them, and they correctly view this as such since they are not stupid
- While the media may try to make it happen, very few Finnish people will be wearing tinfoil hats while screaming about conspiracies that data centers destroy H20 molecules, since they have one of the best education systems in the world
Does this mean that no U.S. privacy oriented data will be stored in Finland.
No traceable HIPAA data or financial data and no national security data.
... or is it stored in Finland but encoded.
> As part of the deal, Google signed a 22-year contract with Finnish utility Fortum to buy up to 50% of the output from the Loviisa nuclear power plant.
> Finland has emerged as an attractive location for data centres because of its cool climate, plentiful low-carbon electricity and relatively uncongested power grid.
I hope the data center's waste heat can be used for some form of district heating! Finland has pretty great municipal infrastructure, but I don't know enough about its heating systems.
Good on Google.
Finland has low emissions from electricity :
https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/all/yearly
71 gC02eq/kwH
France, Sweden and Norway look like good places for data centres in Europe too on the basis of low electricity emissions.
At least Sweden is struggling a lot with scaling its power production, to the point where it's a problem for existing and new industries and causing some rather extreme price volatility.
A lot of the green energy is from hydro dams and you can't really add new rivers to the geography to support additional industry.
Only because the power company won't let them buy all of it, because their finance team wants a diversified customer base
Hopefully, such deals will also convince countries to build more nuclear power plants or expand existing ones. Europe urgently needs more electricity.
Oh good. Then Google will be "clean", while countless homes will be getting their power from coal or whatever instead of this nuclear plant.
The plant may be closed without this Google's order. The cost to keep it running is substantial. I guess that's what you prefer?
"The Finland deal will ensure that the Loviisa plant keeps operating beyond 2030, the companies said in a statement. Keeping it running until 2050 will require about €1 billion of investments over the years"
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-09-09/google-gi...
Finland doesn't get the rest of its power from coal, they're one of the greenest energy markets on the planet.
It's a market. Why can't someone buy it?
Why does it matter that homes "aren't clean" while Google is? That's silly. There's going to be the same level of demand no matter what - the same mix of coal and nuclear inputs will happen regardless of where the outflows are. It's fungible.
More demand will in time result in an increase in supply. That's a good thing. We'll be building a lot more, and it's long overdue.
Google is buying the output because they are increasing demand by half a nuclear power plant's worth of power. I actually think it's pretty reasonable to pass a law demanding they build an entire nuclear power plant here.
"The agreement with Fortum provides long-term financial certainty for the Loviisa plant, which currently generates about 10% of Finland's electricity.
Fortum said Google's commitment would support an investment programme aimed at extending the life of the nuclear station and increasing its generating capacity."
Long-term PPAs are what you usually want because they are bankable and give you solid demand on which to expand. Which is literally what they're talking about doing.
If I build a house and the demand goes up I don't have to build the solar panels (and everything else involved) to cover it, I pay the utility company to build that based on how much I'm needing to use. Well, normally I pay for whatever they think will make them the most money to deliver that much electricity - Google is specifically paying to make sure they see the utility company sees it as increased demand and revenue for more nuclear.
You'd get denied getting connected or expanding your business or adding a car charger, as is reality in parts of Scandinavia, if it was an issue.
I think government regulations to put a cap on utility profits is a better long term move. Force excess to be directed into green energy expansion.
> government regulations to put a cap on utility profits
I don't know about Finland specifically, but isn't this already the case practically everywhere?
At this point with all the free-market-hand waving going around, it feels like someone telling me that it's not urin raining down on me, just sparkling trickle down economics.
You now have a PhD in your pocket.
Is that not the miracle of the free market?
King Richard II would have killed for an iPhone, PS5, air conditioning, and Uber Eats. He'd swap places with you, and he was king. You don't realize how awesome you have it.
Just a hundred years ago your ancestors were (probably) eating rotten meat and drinking unclean water.
> King Richard II would have killed for an iPhone, PS5, air conditioning, and Uber Eats. He'd swap places with you, and he was king.
I don't for a moment believe that, but apparently arguments that cannot possibly be proven are in vogue nowadays.
It's such an incredibly shallow way of looking at very complicated history, I wouldn't even know where to start. There is nothing worth arguing in their comment. It sounds like what young people nowadays call "NPC" I guess.
King Richard II would look at those devices you're offering and have you flayed for heresy
Sir, you have huffed one too many of your own farts and become delerious
You’re assuming a large enough supply that can absorb demand. This is true in China but not generally in the West.
If supply was just in time constructed so you maybe have only like 10-30% extra vs peak, the 50% of a nuclear power plant shifts the preexisting non-Google demand onto the non-nuclear sources as the plant can no longer meet its non-Google demand. It’s generally no different than if Google acquired that electricity from the available mix rather than the plant directly.
The thing it gives them is the ability to meet their individual net-0 targets (and thus government incentives) - a local optimization at the cost of a global net negative (at least as far as carbon electricity sources goes)
This is a case where the supply was about to be gone and Google provided funds to keep it operating (the original nuclear reactor began operation in 1977 and it now needed EUR 700M to extend the service life). And one can probably guess that this supply just wasn’t cost competitive in the first place, but Google increased the demand so much that it now becomes cost competitive.
Yes let's shame corporations for spending money on and supporting things that need more support. /s
Somehow folks want this little problem of climate change to go away without any change in their own behaviors. Somehow corporations who sell them goods will just magically "be green" while flying around the world and drinking out of plastic bottles and subscribing to the latest fast-fashion website. But then when the corporations say "yes we should be green" that's a problem too. You just can't please some people, they're just here to complain, not actually see anything positive in the world.
Don't forget that they buy countless things from China, who is by a very large margin the largest polluter in the world.
I dont know why people bring this up. China has nowhere near the highest per capita pollution levels.
Per-capita can be bad and so can overall scale. It wouldn't matter if Norway was the highest per-capita because like 5 people live there.
Per capita is worse by definition, unless your arguing that people with higher per capita emissions are somehow more valuable to society than those with lower.
The other aspect is that China provides a large industrial base for the West, which is arguably the West just externalizing/offshoring their emissions anyway.
It’s unclear. It helps Google with their marketing that they’re a net zero carbon company. But if what’s happening is they’re displacing previous nuclear power users onto dirtier, that’s not really reducing carbon and it’s making it seem like Google isn’t the problem when it actually is - without them that community might otherwise be 100% nuclear and it would be no different from a macro level from Google adding that consumption to dirty sources.
> But if what’s happening is they’re displacing previous nuclear power users onto dirtier, that’s not really reducing carbon
That's not the case, because in EU (and thus Finland) electric production is under cap-and-trade. There is just no way to increase dirty electricity production in EU. Apart from political pressure to change rules, which for example Italy is doing because Italy built their grid on gas...
> they’re displacing previous nuclear power users onto dirtier
They are not. The plant may not survive beyond 2030 without this order.
It's a good thing that green energy isn't a fixed quantity and more can be built if there's demand, which is exactly what Google is doing.
It's great for marketing and, you're right, that's why they are doing it but the reason it's good for marketing is that their customers care about the environment. This is the exact invisible hand mechanism in action. It's their preferences changing the behavior of one of the biggest corporations in the world and all they can do is act like it doesn't count because they don't actually care
Far north cool places seem logical for data centers.
Not Texas and Arizona. Why?
Southern states have more republicans so it's easier to sell public land or draw this kind of contracts without a massive community backlash
Nuclear is the most expensive form of clean energy. It is likely to bankrupt at least one company.
When Finland contracted with France to build their latest reactor, they wisely had a fixed price contract where the French company would pay for const overruns. At groundbreaking in 2005, they planned for a 2009 completion. In 2016 it bankrupted Areva, with the French government owned EDG saving parts of the company crucial to the nation. It wasn't completed u tip 2023:
https://www.helsinkitimes.fi/finland/finland-news/domestic/2...
When the US last decided to build nuclear, Westinghouse AP1000s, two in South Carolina and two in Georgia, it resulted in the bankruptcy on Westinghouse, putting all of Toshiba, its owner, at risk:
https://www.csis.org/analysis/westinghouses-bankruptcy-and-i...
The two South Carolina reactors were abandoned at the cost of a substantial fraction of the build cost, in the billions, and utility executives went to jail for deception about it. Georgia finished its two reactors, but only by creating some of the most expensive electricity out there today.
Storage and renewables are cheaper, faster to deploy, and work really really really well in Texas and Arizona. Despite nearly free natural gas in Texas due its state as a by-product of oil extraction, most of the new electricity grid assets in Texas are wind, storage, and solar, and that's independent third party investors making those choice in the grid to make money, as Texas has perhaps the "freest" electricity market in the United States when it comes to who is allowed to build grid assets and make money off them.
If the far north places have hydro that's already built and not being used, that makes sense for data centers. But new nuclear is not a serious technology, it exists mostly based on vibes.
Arizona is conducive to abundant solar power, so that'd be a good reason to build there. Similar deal here in Nevada (with the added bonus of Nevada being a giant blob of geothermal heat, further driving renewable energy supply and therefore datacenter attractiveness).
Perhaps the extra cost in freeze proofing certain systems and the inability to rely on evaporative cooling techniques? The availability of power in the winter might be a problem too when northern home's power and energy usage all ramp up. In the summer you need nearly the same amount of capacity for cooling as the south so there isn't much savings there.
Politics means putting job creating infrastructure projects in red states to curry favor with Republican demographics.
Republican south states have also decided to reject science and embrace fossil fuels - global warming shall be the problem of our grandchildren, feel free to build as many gas turbines as you wish!
Calling data centers “job creating infrastructure” seems like a bit of an oxymoron tbh
The company my brother works for (fairly small) is involved in the construction and maintenance of the electrical side of the data grid. Apparently they need to hire at least 20 people a month for the foreseeable future to keep up with demand, as they're already booked out with projects into 2030 or something like that.
Overall, it's not exactly a ton of jobs for how much money is going into them, but it isn't nothing.
> Overall, it's not exactly a ton of jobs for how much money is going into them, but it isn't nothing.
I’m not disputing that data center buildouts will have some localized job creation, but the net effect of all those data centers will be overwhelmingly negative on employment if everything the AI companies are saying is true
1. Cheap natural resource 2. Fiber connectivity 3. Low population density 4. Favorable regulatory environment
Depending on how far north you mean, you lose all or all but one of the above.
Google claims that 10% of its power goes to non-computing overhead. Even if that were 0 somewhere else, ok how much more expensive is the power in that area, probably more than 11%. And I don't know how much they spend on power to begin with, relative to the other costs that probably go up.
* good access to power (this might not mean the cheapest always, but actually getting to it.
* easy permitting
* lots of space
Which makes Arizona an interesting place to place any new builds of any sort of data center. They’ve been talking about the scarcity of resources there for years, and it’s currently in an escalating tailspin of abundance. Power is cheap as hell there, but once the water dries up… things might change quickly.
New Gen data centers are closed loop and don’t use water at nearly the same rate as previous generations
There's also a power generation water cost though!
Something like 500g/MWh for gas/coal/nuclear (~70% of power in AZ), so a huge xAI datacenter (Colossus 2, ~1 GW/h) would use ~700 MW of this type, or ~350k gallons of water an hour, which would be 0.2% of the Colorado rivers flow rate last year.
I don't know if that's significant.
Pulling recent data from the EIA, of the roughly 10,000 megawatts of new power capacity installed in Arizona between 2023 and 2025, 50% is batteries, 40% solar, 6.5% wind, and 3.5% gas. Now, most solar and wind plants rarely if ever hit their nameplate capacity, but it’s pretty clear the large majority of new power generation isn’t consuming water. https://www.eia.gov/electricity/data/eia860/
Does that change the math above if they're tied into the grid?
If they're tied directly to the renewables (Meta is doing this in some places), then true, not a technical increase. But you could still maybe claim they're instead preventing the equivalent reduction on average/grid (and, say, decommission of some of that coal). I suppose that's a separate point.
Got an example? I'm pretty sure new datacenters are still using cooling towers.
QTS is building a second campus in Chicago with closed loop
https://q.com/resources/how-qts-data-centers-use-closed-loop...
Ok, those are truly closed loop. As in, they use ambient cooling or active chillers. I've seen too many cooling tower sites described as closed-loop because the internal system is.
North Dakota and Alaska also have lots of space.
Alaska’s land is pretty rugged and hard to build on. It would be interesting to hear from someone who works in the industry why the Northern Interior states like Montana, North Dakota, and Minnesota have fewer data center buildouts than Texas though.
Agree with this. Natural gas is effectively free there. Maybe it’s the fiber connectivity that prevents them from being built? I genuinely don’t know.
Alaska has a speed of light problem.
Doesn't seem especially relevant for LLMs. Especially not for training, but even for inference.
Sure, but it seems very reasonable to expect some co-hosting of latency sensitive tasks, especially with some low hanging thin client fruit, like cloud gaming and the like. After using cloud hosted computers for a while, I personally think it's the future for most heavy workstations.
Unions. Northeastern states expect that you will use union labor to build your projects or they will shut you down.
Pennsylvania, for example, was one of the few places to take Walmart to task for employing illegal labor.
Texas and Arizona are notoriously anti-union and anti-resident/pro-corporation.
The requirement to use union labor for construction hasn't stopped datacenter buildouts here in Nevada.
Before the American tinfoil-hat data center nuts comes out in force:
- This is a plant that was going to be decommissioned without investment
- Finland is a rational country due to their small size and unfortunate proximity to Russia. They tend to do rational things like invest in good energy infrastructure. Nobody will be losing power due to this deal
- Finland is one of the cleanest/greenest energy markets on earth, and the country is largely a giant unpopulated forest
- Finland currently has the highest unemployment in Europe, this is a great win for them, and they correctly view this as such since they are not stupid
- While the media may try to make it happen, very few Finnish people will be wearing tinfoil hats while screaming about conspiracies that data centers destroy H20 molecules, since they have one of the best education systems in the world
Does this mean that no U.S. privacy oriented data will be stored in Finland. No traceable HIPAA data or financial data and no national security data. ... or is it stored in Finland but encoded.