Alphabet-owned Google has announced plans to invest an additional 1 billion euros (£861 million) into the expansion of its data centre campus in Finland.

This move aims to drive the growth of its artificial intelligence (AI) business in Europe, as stated in a company statement on Monday.

In recent years, Nordic countries have become popular locations for data centres due to their cooler climate, tax incentives, and abundant availability of renewable power. However, Finland's neighbours Sweden and Norway have grown increasingly critical of hosting these facilities, with some industry experts arguing that the Nordic nations should utilise their renewable energy for products such as green steel, which could potentially create higher surplus value within the countries.

Despite this criticism, Finland's wind power capacity has surged by 75 per cent to 5,677 megawatts in 2022 alone, leading to plummeting prices on windy days, as per industry statistics. This abundance of renewable capacity remains available for data centres like Google's, which acquires wind power in Finland under long-term contracts.

Analysts believe that the power consumption of data centres is set to increase massively due to the rapid growth in AI usage, a factor cited by Google as one of the reasons behind its investment decision. Additionally, the Hamina data centre in Finland already operates with 97 per cent carbon-free energy.

"Heat generated by our Finnish data centre will be redirected to the district heating network in nearby Hamina, providing warmth to local households, schools, and public service buildings," Google stated. The company aims to achieve net-zero emissions across all its operations and value chain by 2030.

In addition to its Finnish investment, the search and cloud giant announced last month that it would build new data centres in the Netherlands and Belgium.

---