According to a statement released on Monday, Alphabet-owned Google (GOOGL.O) plans to invest an additional 1 billion euros ($1.1 billion) in expanding its data center campus in Finland to support the growth of its artificial intelligence (AI) business in the region.
The Nordic countries have seen an increase in the number of data centers in recent years because to the region’s cheaper temperatures, favorable tax laws, and plentiful supply of renewable energy.
Recently, the Nordic neighbors of Finland—Sweden and Norway—have been more critical of its hosting. According to some industry experts, the Nordic nations ought to employ their renewable energy resources to produce goods like green steel, which may have a larger surplus value in their respective nations.
However, according to industry figures, Finland’s wind power capacity has grown so quickly in recent years—it climbed by 75% to 5,677 megawatts in 2022 alone—that on windy days, costs have fallen to zero.
Consequently, data centers like Google’s, which purchases wind power in Finland under long-term contracts, can still use renewable capacity.
Analysts predict that data centers’ power consumption will skyrocket as a result of the exponential rise in AI usage, which Google itself mentioned as a factor in its choice to invest, combined with the fact that its data center in Hamina, Finland, is already 97% carbon-free.
“Heat coming out of our Finnish data center will be re-routed to the district heating network in nearby Hamina, covering local households, schools and public service buildings,” the statement from Google read. By 2030, it stated, it hoped to have achieved net zero emissions throughout its whole value chain and operations.
The massive search and cloud company stated last month that it would construct new data centers in the Netherlands and Belgium in addition to its investment in Finland.