Google will buy half the electricity from one of Finland's nuclear power plants
bbc.com368 points by lukaspetersson a day ago
368 points by lukaspetersson a day ago
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.
With hindsight, it wasn't a very good idea to shut down 6 of 12 nuclear reactors. Still much better than the situation in Germany, but that's a very low bar.
It will be interesting to see how the Rolls-Royce SMR project works out. Since it appears to be impossible to build anything cheaply in the UK, this will be the real test.
> Since it appears to be impossible to build anything cheaply in the UK
The solution is to build nuclear power stations on ships in China, then sail them to the UK and plug them in.
If power prices elsewhere in the world become advantageous, sail them elsewhere and plug them in there.
You still have the interconnection costs, but seaside places sometimes have high voltage connections for existing or historic power plants (who themselves are water cooled)
A Chinese nuke on the coast of Britain might be hard politically. Even if it's benign, you can bet the US will run an expensive campaign to discredit it in public opinion.
There's a special line crossed by a 100% Chinese owned floating nuclear power plant, as opposed to a 24% Chinese owned fixed in place nuclear power plant like the Hinkley Point C nuclear power station?
You wouldn't even need it to be Chinese owned. Just Chinese built and indemnified. Hell, I'd take a guarantee from a consortium of Chinese SoE banks over the U.S. government today. (I'm American.)
Even if you own it, you'll need the Chinese to run it for you and provide you with spares.
Sort of like needing the US for F-35 parts? Given the choice between being dependent on China or the US, I know which one I'd choose - China is running a business, the US is running... God knows what it is they think they're running, but it's not something you want to get tied up in.
Not really. If something bad happens you can always just drag the boat back to China and say here you deal with this lol
Sweden main issue is that there is no transmission capacity between North and South, like now prices are 2x at south.
The government that keeps rejecting offshore wind for bogus security reasons is probably a bigger factor.
Those wind farms would have connected into the zones with the highest prices.
They've rejected an amount that would generate more than the entire grid usage. Or way more than double what the cheap zones generate from their 2/3rds hydro and 1/3rd wind.
On one hand Swedish government rejected applications for 11 offshore wind sites on national security grounds, on the other hand, wind investors state that they will not do wind investments in Sweden without subsidies.
" risk-sharing mechanism will be required, for example through two-sided Contracts for Difference and state-backed credit guarantees that reduce investment risk and unlock project financing.”
https://www.renews.biz/offshore-wind/skyborn-calls-for-swedi...
That's due to shutting down reactors in the south. Turns out "transmission capacity" is more complicated than having fat wires...
Shutting down => Not building new ones. All decommissioned reactors would have reached EOL by 2025 anyhow.
Pretty much every reply to the parent has now given a very different reason for why the problem exists. Anyone else want to give it a try? Bonus points for mentioning meatballs and/or lutfisk.
There is plenty transmission capacity, the issue is EU regulations not allowing Sweden to keep prices low in the south.
With Russia‘s aggression and the rise of drone wars it’s a pretty good idea to get rod of such big single point of failures like nuclear power plants.
And climate change also isn’t in favor of nuclear power plants that need external water sources for cooling
Power generation is 25% higher with 6 than with 12 reactors. Plenty of scaremongering around volatility, though. Consumers don't realize that one-hour price spikes are completely irrelevant since they pay monthly (or even quarterly) AVERAGE prices. Max, min, mean, and standard deviation. People don't know statistics and are so easy to fool by demagogues.
Large customers buy directly on electricity markets at hourly market price, or have direct power purchase agreements with power suppliers.
Most small customers are paying using average prices, but these average prices are calculated from the costs of power suppliers and these are affected by hourly market prices. So when many small customers consume use lot of electricity during hours with high hourly market price, the average price for small customers goes up.
Best solution is instalation of smart meters so that small customers pay according to hourly market price.
Yeah please send some electricity to Germany it's so horrible here :'(
You certainly could use an alternative to gas heating during the upcoming winter. It doesn't look like Qatar will be able to deliver.
Still can’t believe the german voters were successfully convinced that replacing german nuclear with russian fossil was a green choice
Is that really it? I thought Sweden was a net exporter and that the price volatility was much more related to the eu pricing and distribution?
the north exports, the south imports.
If you run datacenters in the north its substantially cheaper.
Places like Malmö have had issues with power costs, even though there's a lot of generation... because that generation happens in the north.
> Sweden is struggling a lot with scaling its power production, to the point where it's a problem for existing and new industries
Excess power is unevenly distributed both geographically and temporally.
In the SE1 region, which is the least populated and probably best candidate for a data center, there was a 400% price drop between February and March this year, then up 100% in May, then down 50% in July. Between summer 2025 and winter 2026, the same region saw a price hike of nearly 1000%.
https://data.nordpoolgroup.com/auction/day-ahead/prices?deli... 12¤cy=EUR&aggregation=MonthlyAggregate&deliveryAreas=SE1,SE2
https://data.nordpoolgroup.com/auction/day-ahead/prices?deli...
I guess if you want a data center that only operates some months of the year that's fine.
The bottleneck is the grid, not the production centers. Volatility is not more extreme in Sweden than other connected (Nord Pool) countries. Companies lament the lack of grid connectivity all the time. Then they get the offer "Pay for the cost of grid expansion to connect you" and they are not so interested anymore.
>you can't really add new rivers to the geography to support additional industry.
yes, you can - with all those fiords surrounded by mountains you can use excess wind/solar (your own as well as German, etc.) and pump water up a dammed fiord to generate the electricity later when no cheap excess available.
Well, we don't have fjords or mountains in Sweden, otherwise a great plan.
There are both mountains [0] and fjords [1] in Sweden, but not of the Norwegian kind they were probably picturing.
Build a dam in the fjord and pump the water out from it with excess electricity! Profit
This assumes that there is excess power at some point. This will soon become unrealistic: we either need power for data centers during the day or charging vehicles during the night.
The solution works only to keep a steady production of electricity, but if the demand would require full output all the time then these "mechanical batteries" don't help.
France recently announced for €93B of data center contracts to be deployed in the next few years.
The countries that could decarbonize their electricity all rely on nuclear, hydro or geotherm.
China added 315 GW of solar and 120 GW of wind capacity in the year 2025.
There is a lot of hydro generation deployed (1455 GW) but only 30 GW capacity added worldwide in 2025, and 200 GW added worldwide during last 10 years.
Total geothermal capacity is 15 GW worldwide in 2025.
https://www.irena.org/Publications/2026/Mar/Renewable-capaci...
Here in Norway we already have issues with volatile and high electricity prices, because:
1) We're not expanding hydropower generation very much. We can upgrade existing dams for improved efficiency, but no new dams are being planned, because it's politically and environmentally arduous to do so. There's some wind buildout, but that's also a political quagmire due to nimbyism. Nuclear isn't even close to having a political consensus behind it, and even if it did, it would take years. And our geography is uniquely ill suited for solar.
2) Winters have less and less snow, summers have less and less rain, leading to issues filling reservoirs. This will only get worse in the future.
3) The north has a surplus, but the infrastructure for transferring it to the south is underdeveloped
4) lots of the electricity we generate is being sold to central Europe to compensate for Germany's idiotic decision to shut down their nuclear reactors and Trump's idiotic decision to send oil prices over $100
Unfortunately data centres are currently being built, which depresses me. Because who will use them? Giant American tech companies will use them, to lobotomise our youth, poison our political discourse and steal our personal data. Fuck that.
Data centres also create very few jobs beyond the initial construction phase. Overall it's a very, very bad deal for Norway as a nation.
Agreed on all points, but you forgot to mentioned that Google pay close to no taxes in Norway (~1%). At the same time, their hyperscaler in Skien alone will, when finished, consume ~5% of total energy production. Put another way, 25% of what households use.
Now Google is planing another hyperscalar in Østfold, and other hyperscalars are being built in rapid succession (about 50 is planned), putting a severe strain on our power transfer net.
This is because any 2x improvement in model capability requires 10x the compute
So Germany is a net exporter of energy and is somehow causing checks notes ALL of Europe's high energy prices?
Weird
Germany became a net electricity importer after shutting down its final nuclear power plants in 2023.
On top of that, heating still runs mostly on gas, which won't be fun this winter. Due to the inefficiency of gas heating, there will be less gas available for Germany's gas power plants.
Now imagine if Germany's dream of hydrogen vehicles, where most hydrogen comes from gas, also became a reality...
By the first quarter of 2026, Germany recorded net exports of 2.6 TWh. In the middle of winter. We are out of the lump.
In absolutely no way is that true. The EU price varies by renewables production. When it's dark and still that's when electricity costs the most, and that's when Germany imports energy. It exports when there's sun and wind, but then the energy is cheap. So Germany sells low and buys high. Doesn't matter if Germany is a net exporter because it exports at the wrong time.
> The EU price varies by renewables production.
This may be technically true at the moment, but the underlying reason for the high prices is fossil fuels: when renewable generation is low, natural gas peaker plants are generating, and these have the highest cost of any generation source, and by the merit order rules under which commodity markets such as electricity operate, the highest source price sets the price of the commodity.
The obvious and affordable mitigation for high prices is to build out massive battery storage capacities so that natural gas plants are needed far less often.
Yes, I agree, but first you need to get planning and connection permission for those battery storage locations. I wouldn't hold my breath.
92 units (1 MW or larger) were connected in the first half of 2026 adding 842 MW/1.8 GWh, which is more than all of 2025 so this is both happening and accelerating. In addition small scale storage also seems to be adding a significant amount of capacity.
https://modoenergy.com/research/en/germany-battery-buildout-...
Germany has excess coal and gas capacity which they can turn on when needed. They, like most people import when it's cheaper than the local alternative.
Interconnected nations all importing when cheap electricity is available lowers costs for everyone.
Looking up the numbers Germany sells high and buys low when it's net importing
In the long term interconnected nations might make electricity cheap everywhere. Currently it's mostly making it more expensive everywhere else. (As someone living in south of Sweden.)
Edit: But to be fair... The biggest reason it's expensive is likely that companies like to make money.
When you look at the first half of the year, Germany was a net importer of electricity:
>Net imports amounted to only 1.3 TWh, compared with 9.6 TWh during the first half of 2025.
Though 1.3 TWH is a huge improvement over 9.6 by any standard.
For some reason the HN commentariat is very pro-nuclear, and it drives them INSANE that the shutdown had minimal consequences(as only a small proportion of power production was nuclear and it was entirely replaced by new renewable capacity).
I think no one outside of Germany particularly cares about their internal politics, energy prices, or what role the Energiewende placed in the long-term industrial slowdown. The criticism that Germany gets for the Energiewende is that they decided to shut down nuclear power plants while THEY WERE STILL BURNING COAL! I don't think this legally qualifies as a crime against humanity, but it was horribly negligent.
Coal is such a dirty fuel, that burning it should be a last resort. A properly running coal plant with all safety equipment working will kill people through pollution. Every year in Germany and all downwind countries people die due to the effects of burning coal. (See https://wwfeu.awsassets.panda.org/downloads/dark_cloud_repor.... )
Long term, it is hard to know the loss of life that will come from this foolish policy. The Energiewende was implemented around 2010 - they knew about the role of CO2 as a greenhouse gas and they. did. it. anyway.
So now 15 years later, how much dependent is Germany on coal? Last I looked it was about 20% of the electrical power generated. They estimate that sometime between 2030 - 2038 they will stop all burning of coal.
People outside Germany are just sad about it. German electricity production was at
339 gC02eq/kwH
for the past year. That's ten times the level of France.
This is basically due to Google probably rightly believing that electricity price in Finland is going up due to all these datacenters and also a pr stunt that the current government loves because they can claim that they aren't allowing these datacenters to raise electricity price.
This isn't investing in power infrastructure in any way, there is no reality where that nuclear plant wasn't staying in operation as long as they can possibly keep it running in the foreseeable future. Basically only way Google and Fortum will be building new nuclear capacity is by Finland promising to cover any electricity price below 15 cents per kWh in the market.
A customer willing to make a multi-decade deal for half a reactor at a stable price is perfect for incentivizing new nuclear buildouts. The basic financial problem of nuclear is that it' capex heavy and opex-light, so the costs of the entire enterprise are set during the buildout stage, but the revenue is volatile.
It is worth noting that Finland is a member of Nord Pool (for electricity) which includes all Nordic nations. You cannot consider Finland alone in your supply and consumption expectations -- you need to include Norway, Sweden, Denmark, and Finland. Both Norway and Sweden have massive annual electricity exports exceeding 30 TWh for each country. 60 TWh is the equivalent of four EPR nuclear power units that can produce about 14 THw per year! That is crazy over capacity in my view. The block has plenty of supply.
Further, the article specifically says:
> Google signed a 22-year contract with Finnish utility Fortum to buy up to 50% of the output from the Loviisa nuclear power plant.
You can't sum like that, though. Connections between regions and countries have capacity limits, so it would matter where in Finland you placed a data-center, if you wanted to take into account the electricity coming from Sweden and Norway.
Norway exports electricity primarily to England and Germany, only a little goes to Finland:
https://www.statnett.no/en/for-stakeholders-in-the-power-ind...
Sweden sent 10.6TWh in 2025:
https://www.svk.se/om-kraftsystemet/kraftsystemdata/elstatis...
This matches what Finland says about imports - imported 8.1TWh from Sweden but 0.2TWh from Norway in 2024
https://energia.fi/en/statistics/statistics-on-electricity/
Take a look at the map. Sweden has three underwater cables to the south of Finland near Helsinki (quite near Olkiluoto NPP). Norway only connects in the very far north, its nearest "connection" is via Sweden to near Oulu.
> they aren't allowing these datacenters to raise electricity price
If you reduce supply,price generally goes up. Buying a power plants output reduces supply
What it does allow is for Google and the governemt to say these data centres aren’t generating any co2
Of course everyone’s else’s co2 emissions then increase instead.
The only solution is more zero co2 emissions. Google could have funded large wind farms, or a new nuclear plant, or grid connections to other locations. But that would cost more.
Google has been doing all of that for decades. I remember when they started building their first data center (back when almost no companies required enough compute for an entire data center) they chose the location due to the cleanest energy they could find (hydroelectric on a river that wasn't blocking fish migration).
Only if demand increases to the point where supply cannot meet demand in a short enough time frame. Capacity is a factor here.
You buying a doughnut - even half the doughnuts - from a doughnut shop does not increase the price of the remaining doughnuts unless they can't make enough to satisfy remaining demand and people are willing to outbid you rather than wait.
Does that power station have enough capacity to satisfy the remaining demand?
POV: you know nothing about how energy market works.
Not only disappointing such comments exist on HN, but to be at top is depressing.
> 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.
Google already does this at their existing Hamina data center. The building is also a repurposed paper mill.
https://blog.google/company-news/inside-google/around-the-gl...
The new planned datacenters aren't near major population centers, so potential for district heating might be limited. Eyeballing from the map one of them is about has about 25 km from Oulu (pop 200k), and another is 30 km from Kajaani (30k). But that's about it.
Edit: I was wrong, the locations do have small (5-10 MW) district heating networks.
there are some papers about communal gardens heated by data centers... since they don't produce as much there, hope it also paves the way for developing indoor agriculture
For those regions green house and barn heating is a major cost (to the point that Norway for example subsidizes barn heating for dairy farmers), while pretty much all the energy consumed by a datacenter goes straight to heat without any meaningful work (in thermodynamic sense) done, so it sounds like a good match.
The city of Kajaani's district heating (northern Finland) is already completely covered by datacenter waste heat from CSC datacenters (and maybe some other ones).
Microsoft's data centre in Espoo is used for district heating.
>When the Microsoft datacenter areas are finalized and the waste heat offtake is working fully, the heat from fossil-free fuels will cover 40% of all district heating in Espoo.
>the data center's waste heat
One can imagine the saunas the guys will have there :)
On the main point - there are persistent leaks/rumors that one of the main points of the Trump's envoys (Kushner and Witkoff) to Putin is building data centers in Karelia ( the Russian side of Finland border) - the same reasons of cheap electricity and plentiful of cool water.
Finland did the right thing with nuclear.
We have an election in Sweden tomorrow. The current government have started securing investments in clean energy (i.e nuclear energy).
Some opposition parties, including the "greens" (MP) are vehemently opposed to it.
Google (or Tuike Finland as its known)
- paid 0e company tax in 2023/2024 (2025 hasn't been published yet)
- Doesn't generate any value added taxes as it only has one customer, Google Emea in Ireland
- Employs directly 120 persons
Somehow Hetzner saw at least part of it coming in 2018
https://www.hetzner.com/pressroom/five-years-helsinki/
These low prices are cost savings that we pass directly onto our customers; they come from the reduced energy prices that we pay in Finland compared to Germany, and also come from the colder climate and lower cooling requirements
When Google was going hard on deploying renewables they stressed "additionality".
They didn't want to just buy clean hydro that already existed, or renewables that were going to get built anyway without their money, they wanted to be sure that their investment was growing the amount of clean energy available.
I'm hoping they have some justification like this for buying existing nuclear. They appear to be claiming that it would shut if they didn't pay in advance.
A similar deal by Amazon got shot down in America because the regulators realised it was shifting costs onto other grid users.
You'd assume that Finnish regulators are better than American regulators, but I’d like to see some evidence of that.
Finnish regulators are not better than American counterparts. This deal long time cost will be most likely paid by us common folk.
It is common trend currently here in Finland due to economic situations that data centers can basically get cheap electricity deals and common folks pay it.
I feel this will not end well… if we don’t continue building nuclear. I hope this will force us to continue building asap.
Will all these data centers really be needed in 5 or 10 years from now?
The technology, compression, etc, for models are getting better and better requiring less and less H/W and power to run the same inference power.
Perhaps our hunger for ever more powerful models will be enough to offset this, but I am not sure.
The trillon dollars question is more, will the current GPUs still be relevant in 3 years? 5? 10?
Will incredibly efficient new GPUs appear? will custom ASIC, models burned in silicons, take off? Will unified memory systems become usable?
The datacenter bets are that things will mostly continue like now, and that these GPUs won’t depreciate too much.
For now theses bets are self-fulfilling, causing hardware to even appreciate.
I predict that within 100 years, data centers will be twice as powerful, ten thousand times larger, and so expensive that only the 5 richest kings of Europe will own them
The (naive or forward thinking depending on your opinion) is that cheaper 'inference' will result in more demand, like the more efficient Watt steam engine increasing consumption of coal.
Probably yes, and if not, it can most likely be repurposed
Enough to pay back the investments on a sensible timescale? Press X to doubt.
It's a big bet to not have a plan for needing power.
I expect as LLMs penetrate further, we'll see much more of it, continually running, and doing more 3D work.
Energy usage for computing by humanity will only go up with time. It should be obvious that most of our energy will go to computing for anyone who's worked with computers. At some point you exhaust the kinds of things you can do in the physical world, but you can compute infinitely. There's limits to where you can go but not to what you can think about.
> Google will build new data centres in Kajaani, Muhos and Vaala
Only because the power company won't let them buy all of it, because their finance team wants a diversified customer base
It’s crazy that Google and TikTok, which mainly produce consumer software to serve ads, have grown to the scale where they literally need to set up data centres in northern countries while getting their power from nuclear power plants.
> mainly produce consumer software to serve ads
Pretty reductionist. I don't know about tiktok, but Google does a lot more than serve ads
Remarkably they are planning even higher electricity use from centers in Sweden, up to 3.5GW. They also have significant centers in Norway. They are going to consume a significant fraction of Scandinavia's total electricity production if these plans are completed.
The power plant is about 1000 MW BTW.
Hopefully, such deals will also convince countries to build more nuclear power plants or expand existing ones. Europe urgently needs more electricity.
The plant mentioned in the article is by no means new, its two reactors began operation in 1977 and 1981, respectively (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loviisa_Nuclear_Power_Plant).
Nuclear power plants are notorious for their long planning, approval and build times (and cost overruns). Then again, I wouldn't want to live near a nuclear power plant built as fast as a data center either...
Finland they made a few mistakes by becoming overly dependent on Russian reactor designs Russian sourced fuel for those reactors. Relations with Russia are a bit strained (especially recently, but they were always complex). Luckily, the wind sector is booming in Finland in recent years. They have a lot of on-shore capacity.
A lot of reactors in the US are similarly dependent on Russia for uranium enrichment and supplies. Some of that dependency relates to post cold war era treaties (now cancelled because of the strained relationship with Russia) for Russia to decommission its nuclear weaponry and to help Russia economically.
The Loviisa plant actually predates the end of the cold war but Finland at the time was not part of NATO and the relationship with the Soviet Union was very complicated given that they had fought an ugly war in WW II that ended up with the Soviet Union taking a large chunk of Finnish territory. The Loviisa plant ended up built during what is now seen as the definitely very chilly phase of the cold war (under Brezhnev).
And then Finland repeated the mistake with their more recent nuclear additions.
You'd be surprised how many European power plants (not only with Russian/Soviet designs) relied and still rely on fuel from Russia (https://www.voiceofemirates.com/en/politics/reports-and-inve...).
A quick search shows that there are plenty of alternatives. First, all nuclear power plants keep a excess supply of fuel on site, about 2-3 years. If Russia says tomorrow: "No more nuclear fuel exports to any 'unfriendly' European nations.", there are plenty of alternatives. US-based Westinghouse already produces nuclear fuel that is compatible with many Soviet-designed reactors. Plus France (Framatome and Orano), Netherlands (Urenco), Canada and Kazakstan can easily backfill any European needs, be it raw material or final fuel.
Why does Finland want to make US companies stronger?
This is the biggest problem with the EU: the EU as well as the member states, are not really thinking strategically here. Not just with regards to nuclear power plants but in general.
I am not against AI data centers. But it's a good thing that the electricity infrastructure expenditures for AI data centers' consumption are paid by the companies making money from AI training and inference, rather than being paid by all taxpayers collectively.
Not sure if this particular project is also sponsored by taxpayers' money or not, though.
If a community's usage is say 60% of what a plant can produce, and $TECH_GIANT comes and buys the other 40%, what happens next?
Power prices will go up, since any growth will exceed the available power generation capacity. Power will become dirtier, since diesel generators will fill in when there is high demand. Then the community will spend a huge amount of money building out more capacity.
I think we will all soon see, communities sharing power infrastructure with massive-demand corporate customers will end badly for the communities.
Pretty much anyone sharing anything with a megarich person ends badly for the people who are not megarich.
This is a weird take. Before the rise of AI/LLMs, a lot of Finland's industry was paper products and high-end manuf'ing. Both of these require a lot of electricity. Did people say the same before? No (or much less).
Did any one factory in those industries (paper and high end manufacturing) use 50% of the output of a nuclear power plant?
No, but one company (UPM -- paper mills) consumes 8-9% of all electricity produced in Finland.
And what percentage of finland does UPM employ?
The four planned data centers involved in this deal, after construction, will likely employ less than 1000 people.
Did you read the article? Google has mentioned four distinct locations. That means at least four separate data centers, possibly more.
I can see that I’m not going to convince you there is a scale and centralization difference here, but maybe you can vibe with the economic difference? Paper mills and manufacturing employs a lot of people. Data centers, once they are built, employ very few people.
I would go even further to say if we can get zero taxpayer dollars in funding, fair and equitable land costs, infrastructure paid for by the companies, and solid ecological plans that are leveraged on threat of removal (not fines), they could be a net good where they are built
Should this apply only to AI compute facilities or all industries?
I have no real evidence for this but I think a general principle of good governance is that the policy is agnostic to the industries which it affects and robust under any set of conditions, so for instance, the price that electric utilities charge should be enough to pay for expansions, either prospectively or retroactively (via loans secured before the construction, taken out against projected future revenue), rather than subsidizing the expansion with taxes collected by industries that won't be using the electricity, or exercising discretionary control over which types of industrial expansion are accommodated through investments in expanding the energy infrastructure.
Huge expansions of energy production have occurred in the past to meet growing demand for energy from then-emerging industries. And I'm not aware of any past campaigns to stop the various industries that needed energy on account of the allegation that their increase in energy usage would burden other sectors of society. I have concern that the treatment of AI compute facilities is based on public opinion rather than rule of law and consistent protection of private property rights.
So, the problem in this case is that there's no gain for the country building the datacentre.
If you're in Finland and there are two possible uses for electricity production, let's say, either a steel plant or a datacentre. The steel plant will employ a bunch of people locally. A datacentre will employ a bunch of people in California.
So if you are to build a datacentre, the deal must necessarily be that the R&D for the models that are to run on it must happen locally. Otherwise there's no reason to give them the allocation over the steel plant.
Okay, that is a fair argument, but the policy that that argument inspires should be implemented in a more agnostic way. There should be some objective measure of "positive economic externalities generated per megawatt of electricity consumed". And projects should be judged on that basis, with projects below a certain threshold either being disallowed or being forced to pay more per megawatt of power consumed on that basis. It shouldn't just be based on some vague intuition, that is largely a product of the virality of the arguments that circulate on social media platforms (like this one).
It's always good to set up objective criteria for decision so as to prevent corruption, yes.
But when ad-hoc deals are made anyway, then it is more important that principles like those have been applied than that everything is ideal.
I'd err on the side of allowing development until a proper regulatory process can be implemented or unless there's a concrete reason to prevent it. If allocating scarce electricity resources to an AI-compete facility prevents the building of a steel plant, that would be a reason worth considering it. But there would need to be a concrete trade-off, not just a default assumption that the effect is net negative on account of the industry that the project falls under.
More generally, the bias is to block development until safety/fairness issues are addressed, but it shouldn't be in my opinion, because that overlooks the risk of inaction.
When development is blocked, what that does is reduce visible risks. What it usually increases however is total risk. We are already under constant threat from deterioration: aging, depreciation and decay. Entropy is the default. Action is what pushes back against it.
We need to weigh any risks restriction prevents against the risks it leaves us less equipped to mitigate.
AI compute is a unique facility: can be placed anywhere, takes in mainly energy, does not produce the same volume or composition of waste, has noise pollution, and needs minimal access.
I am not a regulator but that feels like something that needs new rules
AI compute facilities can inspire new regulations, yes, but what I'm advocating is that those regulations should not concern whether the facility is generating AI inference or aluminum or chemicals. All it should care about is the metrics that are relevant to the community like positive externalities, and negative ones like noise pollution, industrial pollution, etc. And all uses of private property should be judged on the basis of those criteria, not what industrial category the use falls under and the generalizations that are made about that category.
My own cursory take on AI compute facilities is that they're mostly much better for the community than previous industries. They emit zero industrial pollution, and only require water for cooling and energy from any source. The water used can also be recycled. And even in the early designs that don't use recycled water, the water consumed is orders of magnitude less than agriculture.
On the downside, they produce fewer jobs, but they encourage and fund infrastructure upgrades in telecom links and power transmission, which has second-order benefits for the local economy.
And they consume very little government services, so the taxes they pay produce a much larger fiscal surplus for local governments.
They also allow for energy that would otherwise be uneconomical to harvest, to be economically harvested. Let's just take an example of a desert which has very little wildlife, and no major nearby populations. AI compute facilities can make it economical to harvest the sunlight in those regions and make economic use of it.
In general they just use a shitload of energy so prices go up for everyone and produce very little jobs. The worst part is that they don't generate any taxes for locals or Finland in general from services produced by datacenters there, which is very different from other industries.
They pay for the energy they use, which leads to the energy infrastructure scaling up, which generally reduces per unit electricity costs. They also fund, either directly or indirectly through their taxes, upgrades to transmission lines, which also improves the energy infrastructure.
They don't create many permanent jobs on site, it's true, but they also don't consume many government services. So of all the industries, they produce the highest fiscal surplus for local governments. It's a net benefit to the community.
What surplus? They basically only pay property taxes and for services they buy like electricity, like any other company does. But taxes for services they produce go to Ireland. A local industry would have loads of employees and also pay much more taxes that benefits the community.
The community benefit is nowhere close and I'm not sure why you're trying to pretend it is.
> I think a general principle of good governance is that the policy is agnostic to the industries which it affects and robust under any set of conditions
The trouble with this is that people frequently don't like the consequences of that.
For example, a lot of the costs of a grid connection are non-linear if not totally independent of the amount of power you use. When a tree falls on a power line and a crew has to show up and install a new pole, the cost of that has nothing to do with the average percent utilization of those wires. Likewise, a line that can deliver 100MW to a single customer costs more than one that can handle 100kW, but it doesn't cost anywhere near 1000 times as much or consume 1000 times more land etc.
The result of this is that the "works under any set of conditions" pricing for a grid connection would be a flat monthly fee for the capacity of the line totally independent of how much you use, and a line with 1000 times the capacity would only cost e.g. 10 times as much. But then a typical household electric bill would have a fixed charge of ~$100/mo for a grid connection regardless of how little electricity you use.
Likewise, if you have a high proportion of renewable generation in the grid then the price per kWh during daylight hours when there are clear skies would be essentially zero, but the price on a cold still night in winter would be oppressively high and anyone who failed to turn off their electric heat on that specific day would end up with a $5000 electric bill.
So in most places what happens instead is that the power company charges a fee per kWh which is used to pay line crews and other expenses that don't actually depend on usage and then have a much lower fixed connection charge. And charge a certain amount per kWh during days when supply is sufficient and then use the money to subsidize consumption during shortfalls, even though that actually raises total costs, because otherwise people would scream about prices hitting $500/kWh for a few hours every year or two.
But once you're doing those things, a customer that wants megawatts of power is reasonably going to object to that rate structure, because the few percent inefficiency those things induce is millions of dollars in their case. At which point people start complaining about subsidies, even though not doing those things would be the absence of subsidies.
That's a fair point, but even this kind of "exception" to the electricity tariffs (which gives the appearance of a subsidy and elicits public opposition) can be done in a more agnostic way. E.g. a 100 megawatt AI compute facility can be treated the same as a 100 megawatt aluminum smelter, can be treated the same as a 100 megawatt manufacturing plant. Large concentrated consumers of electricity can be treated differently than smaller consumers, but should all be treated the same as each other.
The his will likely put a strain on neighbouring countries energy supply who used to buy that surplus before. Prices will go up even more.
Do you know the specific of which countries buying how much electricity from this plant, or just your wildly guess?
Quick Duck search away: this power plant exports energy to Estonia where energy production is 4x less CO2 efficient. Literally exporting energy right now https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/live/fifteen_minutes
The question is how much they buy. It may not be enough to keep the plant running. Google will only buy up to 50% of what the plant can produce, but the deal allows the plant to operate beyond 2030 according to the operator.
Side note: Really nice dashboard.
> the deal allows the plant to operate beyond 2030 according to the operator.
That’s just PR spin. There is no way it would have shut down in 4 years, there has literally been no talk about doing so and all the political parties are okay with nuclear power as a means to combat co2.
I think that’s a good thing, they could also build a nuclear reactor or two or three. Wouldn’t hurt.
A nuclear reactor is takes years and years to build, this is again Europe selling it's sovereignty to big tech for some short term cash.
So this is the actual long-term bet, where there's incentive to start building more power infrastructure? You'd prefer Finland gets the medium-term results where they don't find a way to finance more nuclear then have to buy gas from Russia like Germany?
Its not like building massive amounts of data centers is a one and done in just a year or two either though.
Ah sorry, yes.
Let’s not fix that problem, get better at doing the thing that Europe was quite capable of doing (see France, Germany before they decided to let the green ideological extremists less the energy strategy) standardise a design and begin solving the energy problem.
Funny you should mention sovereignty, something a country enjoys when it has a source of energy of its own, especially when we can mine our own uranium right on the continent. Alas, we chose not to.
Instead we listen to the green imbeciles and now we’re buying our uranium and hydrocarbons from abroad.
This is a way of transferring money to Finland for whatever the DoD wants to do!!!!
I guess Finland has strong geopolitical security motives here, to create more dependence of the US on them, like in Taiwan.
NATO membership notwithstanding, I don't think anybody in Finland expects the US to ride to rescue if Russia invades.
Finland has no natural resources Russia needs. What they would like is little bit of buffer land for Saint Petersburg, that’s all.
Why not? It would be easier to justify than the current war in Iran.
It would be incredibly easy to justify helping Ukraine against Putin's terrorism, yet here we are.
Its best for all these AI companies to invest in nuclear fission, fusion, dark energy, etc.
Title from the source: Google to fund Finnish AI with €13bn investment and nuclear power pact
Guess it’s a good time to be in the power plant business.
Is this like Coca Cola buying up natural springs in Spain?
So that local consumers start having to depend on bottled water?
What a shit show ...
Note that no such deal is based on solar or wind power alone.
What a huge waste for humanity
who gets the other half? i wouldnt want to share half of anything with Google
Remember: don't be evil kids. Support AI data centres that need to produce nuclear waste so people can make AI cat vids.
It implies we'll get cheap VPS and cloud services, right?
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
Not everything is partisan, and land is only a small factor in where to decide to place a data centers. The top 4 out of 5 states with the most data centers are blue states.
The reason Texas is experiencing a boom in data centers is friendlier power grid policies to data centers (similar to why Google is building in Finland), in combination with (relatively small) tax incentives.
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.
This is Finland. A third of the country is above the Arctic circle. In the winter the sun barely gets above the horizon. Nuclear makes a lot of sense there.
Agreed, it makes sense for Finland, one of the very few places it does. But in the future of global energy supply, nuclear will be a far less serious player than it was in the 20th century.
> new nuclear is not a serious technology
It seems to me the main problem is we build so little of it that we don't have the people, skills, supply chains etc to do it well. China generally builds it's reactors on schedule and within budget.
China is only building a token amount of nuclear compared to storage wind and solar. It makes a lot of sense for a large nation like China to waste a bit of money on nuclear power just to provide support for the core national security interest: nuclear weapons.
On time, yes, because China is great at construction. On budget, almost certainly, but we have very little visibility into true costs. China's labor costs are getting far higher as it becomes richer, and there's a good chance that it will reach a state of higher economic development where its costs for nuclear mirror those high costs in present day France.
A one party state where the plants are owned, insured, backstopped and cleaned up for free by the government doesn’t have the same economics as free market builds.
And even with all that their total share of nuclear is declining y/&y and projected to continue to decline. Because it’s still too expensive even for a autocracy
Russia builds a lot of reactors as well. Hence, they were hired to build the Hanhikivi one in Finland, after the French disaster.
Unfortunately, the project was cancelled for moronic political reasons.
> Unfortunately, the project was cancelled for moronic political reasons.
> In March 2022, in light of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the Finnish Government declared that a rapid independence from Russian energy production is desired, and that the construction of the plant should not continue. Mika Lintilä, Finland's Minister of Economic Affairs, declared that he would not issue a construction permit.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanhikivi_Nuclear_Power_Plant#...
Because the idea of the nuclear plant was to get:
1. Consistent stable long-term energy 2. Controlled by Finland, to minimize all kinds of risks (war foreign influence, cut sea cables, worsening of relationships with other countries, market conditions and economic situation changing.
So what did Finnish politicians decided to do? To cancel the project for nonsense political reasons (let's see how much Finland will be forced to pay in damages), therefore INCREASING the reliance on foreign sources or unstable local sources.
This is the stupidity on the level of "Germany decided to run down all the nuclear powers for the sake of environment". With disastrous results!
"We don't want to allow Russians to build anything" is a statement full of feelings, but not a lot of sense, if one thinks even a little bit deeper.
Finnish oldest Loviisa nuclear station is Soviet based and this has not caused any problems. The nuclear fuel is also being provided by Russia, despite the war.
When your supplier is threatening to invade and kill your people, and has critical control over supply of parts of your reactor, and regularly commits acts of nuclear terrorism such as droning the newly completed sarcophagus around Chornobyl:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_Nuclear_Power_Plant_...
Well, avoiding business deals with that neighbor is the only rational action. Building a Russian nuclear reactor as one of their neighbors is suicidally stupid. At least go to South Korea instead.
The US is also finding out that when it threatens its neighbors and allies that it will lose out on crucial industrial deals, such as Canada and Europe moving away from US military contractors.
There would not be a critical control over the reactor, just the opposite. Finland would control everything and could have even bought fuel elsewhere.
Loviisa station is Soviet-built, has been working amazingly well and till this day has been supplied with the fuel from Russia, despite the war and all.
Nuclear station being a big target on its own is the only negative, among a pile of positives. That's why:
1. Mini-reactors should be developed
2. No, even nowadays, Putin has not really attacked nuclear stations for real in Ukraine. It's been a big no-no. All the rest of the energy infra - yes, but not nuclear stations.
3. If the real war starts with nuclear stations being bombed, it will not matter who build the station, Finland is going to be completely fucked, considering how much of the energy is nuclear. Taking this argument into a logical conclusion, Finland (or any other country) should not have any nuclear reactors on the chance that they will be attacked. This is a silly level of risk management, a very shallow and blind view.
Politics means putting job creating infrastructure projects in red states to curry favor with Republican demographics.
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
> Calling data centers “job creating infrastructure” seems like a bit of an oxymoron
That's your original point, which is wrong since, as you admitted, data center boom is clearly creating jobs.
If you meant those jobs are offset by the negative effect of AI in general if we believe AI companies, a study by Anthropic was actively discussed here a few days ago. TLDR: they don't believe there will be mass unemployment because of AI
“Job-creating infrastructure” would be infrastructure that creates jobs. A chamber of commerce, small business lenders, startup accelerators etc. Building infrastructure of any kind has a temporary positive effect on employment. The builder jobs have nothing to do with the purpose of the infrastructure.
I’m sure Anthropic is saying that now, but there’s no escaping the fact that they and OpenAI repeatedly harped on how it would eliminate mass amounts of jobs for years. Or the mass layoffs blamed on AI that we have already seen.
> “Job-creating infrastructure” would be infrastructure that creates jobs. A chamber of commerce, small business lenders, startup accelerators etc.
Such a bizarre logic. Since when a chamber of commerce or startup accelerators are infrastructure?
Railways or roads are job creating infrastructure, did you see road building or maintenance jobs disappear? Same with data centers, themselves and the infrastructure to support them such as energy.
> I’m sure Anthropic is saying that now, but there’s no escaping the fact that they and OpenAI repeatedly harped on how it would eliminate mass amounts of jobs for years
This is what you said earlier: "but the net effect of all those data centers will be overwhelmingly negative on employment if everything the AI companies are saying is true"
Anthropic is evidently not saying that. Now you're saying maybe they are not but they imply to, or hope for that. Weasel words, don't you think?
I too believe that AI will cause massive uncertainty in society. However anyone who pretends to know with any certainty how our AI shaped future will be is just that, pretentious.
You must be misinterpreting. You believe that organizations that promote small business growth don’t count as underlying systems for job creation? Really?
Per Wikipedia:
> Infrastructure is the set of facilities and systems that serve a country, city, or other area, and encompasses the services and facilities necessary for its economy, households and firms to function.
Let me separate “job creating infrastructure” and “infrastructure that creates jobs” as distinct ideas. Infrastructure is not just physical. Railroads and highways are transportation infrastructure. Data centers are infrastructure, but their primary purpose is not job creation. Any jobs created are tangential to the purpose of supplying networked computer resources. Labor is a cost center for a data center, and their owners aren’t aiming to kill their profit margins.
I wasn’t aware of Anthropic’s recent statements on the matter. And frankly I don’t know why I’d believe that they are being honest when it seems pretty obvious that it’s a play to rehab their reputation. For years they said it would make a majority of jobs obsolete with the heavy implication that their B2B value prop is reducing labor costs.
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!
Yeah I know. Sadly, burning gas and coal is still the cheapest easiest way to rapidly deploy a lot of power, and Texas is all about it.
Renewables can compete but take longer to build. Nuclear is more expensive and takes forever to build. Maybe SMRs will happen but I’m not holding my breath. It’s harder than it sounds to scale that.
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.
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.
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).
* 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.
It's the type of situation where that amount of water use isn't going to move the needle very much even in the desert, but building thermal power plants there there is still kind of silly because a) deserts are generally well-suited to solar, and b) you could also build thermal power plants in places like the midwest where that amount of water use is totally irrelevant.
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...
North Dakota and Alaska also have lots of space.
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. I've been very happy not burning a thousand watts of $0.45/kWh power locally, for my AC to force out of the house, to run blender.
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.
Oh god, they're actually going to directly hoover up electricity supply and cause it to get massively more expensive for us mere mortal domestic users trying to stay alive
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
Its pretty delusional to suggest that working nuclear plant was going to be decommissioned without this considering that electricity consumption is projected to rise rapidly. There currently is shortage of steady power in Finland so no nuclear plants are gonna be closed barring catastrophes.
Finland’s electricity consumption is not projected to rise rapidly.
Finlands energy use in general is in decline, their economy isn’t growing and neither is their population: https://www.treasuryfinland.fi/annualreview2022/energy-consu...
Absent AI, this plant is absolutely the type of thing that a left/Green Party would vote to shut down under the premise that the cost is too great to retool/maintain it and “nuclear bad.” This is a Cold War era Russian plant that needs retooling.
"Electricity consumption will increase from the current approximately 83 TWh to 103–123 TWh by 2030 and 104–159 TWh by 2035."
That is the estimate by the transmission system operator Fingrid. Note that energy consumption and electricity consumption are two different things.
https://www.fingrid.fi/en/grid/development/prospects-for-fut...
In Finland there aren't any political parties talking about shutting down nuclear power.
Yes and Nordea has predicted housing prices will start to climb again every quarter for the last 3 years. Next quarter I guess!
Electricity demand will likely stay well under the lower end of those estimates, but its good that estimating is done optimistically, given it means that level of demand is planned to be supported already.
So it's not like electricity demand is going to grow modestly within a declining energy demand environment (which opens up other opportunities) while nothing new is being built.
The American data-center hysteria is mostly due to the fact that Americans have made it impossible (and have lost a lot of the expertise needed) to build infrastructure, and their faster growing power demand is NOT being met with new supply. This was already happening decades ago, before factoring in AI. US infrastructure is massively underfunded and 60-80 years outdated in most areas due to poor government policy.
You’d be surprised. Case in point Germany.
Did Germany plan to increase electricity consumption? Gas heating is still king there, and Germany famously promotes hydrogen (mostly from gas) over battery vehicles.
Ah yes let’s ignore shutting down nuclear reactors replacing them with coal power plants in the name of green energy which was so successful the country goes through a period every year called Dunkelflaute.
But yes let’s strawman into cars and heating instead.
Btw excess heat from the reactor can be and is used for central heating.
Not really. Situation now is totally different to what it was when Germany made those decisions. In Finland shutting down nuclear hasn't really been something that has been discussed seriously in very long time.
And yet here we, burning coal because god forbid we run a few nuclear reactors right, green energy for everyone! An amazing success!
> while screaming about conspiracies that data centers destroy H20 molecules
This is a gross misrepresentation of the concern. Clean fresh water is locally very important and a finite resource. The vast majority of people know it does not destroy H2O molecules, but moves them to a less useful space.
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.
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im amazed these countries just sit and let this be done to them. makes no sense. it looks like free money but it isn't
Do you care to elaborate on what “this” is that is so bad?
And just out of curiosity, have you come to this opinion independently through your own research?
Or is this just regurgitated sentiment you’re memetically repeating to signal in-group status after consuming reactionary media/clickbait on this topic?
1. Humans use AI
2. AI requires power^
3. AI companies purchase/produce power
4. Humans complain that AI uses power (but continue to use AI)
^Same for water
This is a silly 'news cycle' witch hunt that no economist takes even mildly seriously.
If the consumers of AI aren't paying the marginal costs for the energy they're using, it's a market distortion and we won't have working market discovery of the actual cost performance of the AI. "Wow tokens are so cheap let's use AI for everything" meanwhile the costs are actually being hidden elsewhere.
3a. AI companies make hyperbolic projections on the future use of AI and plan building and powering data centers according to that.
5. when the AI bubble bursts, we'll be left with huge amounts of unused/half-built data center capacity and unused power (with complications such as the data centers belonging to creditors and not being worth nearly as much as the inflated prices paid for building them).
Everyone is rushing to send signals of AI growth to the market. Their continued valuation growth depends on it. There is no real use story that cannot be met by smaller distilled models which are far more energy efficient. I am convinced the next step will be scaremongering impending extinction level event followed by need to classify AI activities as national security related. Once you become part of the military industrial complex, it's all gravy baby!
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...
Lol, it certainly wouldn't have been decommissioned in any case. For that to happen electricity consumption would need to be going down instead of up and Finland would need to have abundance of steady power to replace it.
First of all, are you willing to wait to find out?
Second of all, if it is not Google, it'd be either other businesses, or from tax money. Why should tax money be used to bail out a failed business?
If it costs only €1 billion to extend the lifespan by 20 years, then nothing else can compete with it. The capacity is 1 GW.
There are two completely different businesses.
OL3 will generate ~745 TWh over his life, from a total investment of ~€11bn.
Loviisa life extension will generate ~170 TWH, from an investment of ~€1bn.
Considering the capacity factor, we are comparing 6€/MWh for Loviisa against ~15€/MWh for OL3.
So, it is worth mentioning that extending the life of an existing power plant can be a really good investment.
Main difference is in initial setup/concrete installment!!
You can review all the maths using data from OL3 here: https://reactoratlas.com/en?y=2026&s=finland-olkiluoto-nucle...
No public money needed, it is easily profitable to do without.
And to answer your question: yes I and everyone else in Finland were willkng to wait and find out, it was and is not feasible option to shut it down in few years. If it actually was a realistic option this would have been big news for years now with the highly variable electricity prices we've had after the Russia attack on Ukraine.
> No public money needed, it is easily profitable to do without.
According to whom? Show the number, don't just be hand wavy. If it is struggling now to extend beyond 2030 then how can it easily be profitable? Think about your logic.
> Yes I and everyone else in Finland were willkng to wait and find out
Not the plant operator apparently, who has the stakes in it. Do you pay them enough to run the plant?
Finland doesn't get the rest of its power from coal, they're one of the greenest energy markets on the planet.
But they export a substantial amount to Estonia, who do
Coal usage is rapidly declining in Estonia too: https://www.enerdata.net/estore/energy-market/estonia/
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 the utility company sees it as increased demand and revenue for more nuclear.
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?
Governments are extremely bad at calculating how much something "should" cost. Profits are revenue minus expenses. "Expenses" are revenue to someone else. Whenever you try to cap "profit" of some entity that isn't actually subject to competitive pressure, the next thing that happens is that the people running it start colluding or taking kickbacks from any of the people whose revenue constitutes their expenses.
Because then the utility company's expenses go up, which they would normally not want because it reduces their profit, except that then they can say that their profit isn't over the threshold and use that to increase revenue (i.e. raise prices) and still make the same profit but now also get the kickbacks under the table or help out their cronies by overpaying them.
It also in general deprives them of the incentive to improve efficiency, because reducing waste lowers expenses, which in a normal system you have the incentive to do because it means you make more money, but not if profit is a fixed amount defined by the law regardless of what you do.
Which is to say, it's much better to find a way to narrow the utility monopoly as much as possible and subject them to competitive pressure as much as possible, than to try to pretend that you can limit the profit of an entire monopoly supply chain by declaring that a single entity in it can only have a specific amount.
Do those problems exist as much if the excess was forced into them investing into a certain type of power generation? It seems less "heavy handed", since it's a proper investment for them.
I enjoy a particularly nasty utility monopoly where I am, in a dark blue state, where there is exactly zero political interest in breaking any monopolies. Any competition would probably have to be forced at a federal level. I think less bribing of politicians would happen if you tried to make them do something they were basically already going to do.
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/energyinnovation/2026/03/22/uti...
> Do those problems exist as much if the excess was forced into them investing into a certain type of power generation?
The premise of "excess" already has the problem baked into it.
Suppose an efficient company could provide service for $100 with a $10 profit, but regulators have no practical way of establishing this. The incumbent is instead providing service for $200 with a $10 profit, but then receiving $30 in kickbacks under the table or something of equivalent value not being accounted for in the official books from whoever is now getting $190 instead of $90.
Whereas getting them to invest in a particular type of generation was never hard because you can just give them a financial incentive to do it. If they have to pay a carbon tax out of their profits, which generation types are they going to add?
> If they have to pay a carbon tax out of their profits, which generation types are they going to add?
I see. Thanks for understand! How do you motivate them to actually add capacity? With a monopoly, it seems that adding supply for something people have to use could just reduce rates/profits.
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.
Would you switch positions with King Richard II, then? That's a hypothesis we can test since you're here.
King Richard II would look at those devices you're offering and have you flayed for heresy
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.
Source? The provider had requested to extend the lifetime of that particular reactor to 2050 2 years ago (something they’d started considering 8 years ago). Now maybe they did this contingent on expecting this Google deal to materialize, but it’s not clear to me these Google funds are strictly the only reason they’d keep operating the plant.
From https://world-nuclear-news.org/articles/google-signs-up-for-...
> Currently, about 80% of the projects required to extend the service life and investments of EUR700 million still lack an investment decision. Fortum said the PPA with Google will generate a predictable revenue stream, enabling it to complete the life extension investments at Loviisa.
I think they requested the operating license extension before the actual decision to extend was made.
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.
> 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.
By what definition? If Norway has a 100x higher per-capital admissions rate and 5 people live there it’s inconsequential.
> 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.
I think that is a bad argument because China prefers to have that capacity and specifically courted it as part of their national strategy. Emissions they create are theirs to blame too. Ask China - would you rather have these factories or have lower emissions? The answer is 100% have the factories (and jobs).
When you write things like China is arguably the recipient of western emissions offshoring, despite western countries taking actions to decarbonize or add environmental efficiencies, you deprive China and Chinese people of agency and responsible for their decisions.
By the definition of per capita. If only a small group of people have significant more emissions than the rest of the world, then they're only increasing the average by a small amount, but that's still worse, not better.
Practically speaking, GHG emissions tend to follow income more than country, and that's where a minority (10+%?) of people are responsible for about half of emissions.
https://populationmatters.org/news/2022/02/fat-cats-and-foss...
And I agree that China policy is partially responsible for their industrialization, and that's on the Chinese government, but not on the Chinese people.
Along the same lines, comparatively wealthy Americans (and wealth Chinese, etc...) blaming others for GHG emissions is the primary problem, and like you said, ignoring that deprives them of responsibility for their actions.
> When you write things like China is arguably the recipient of western emissions offshoring, despite western countries taking actions to decarbonize or add environmental efficiencies, you deprive China and Chinese people of agency and responsible for their decisions.
Not only that, it's a misdirect to try to blame countries that have more stringent emissions rules for the results in a country that doesn't.
Suppose that every country banned coal. Obviously then the location of the factories or customers wouldn't affect the amount of coal being burned because the number would be zero either way.
Suppose no country regulated emissions at all. Again the amount of coal being burned doesn't depend on the location of the factories because companies would be able to burn as much as they like regardless of where they are.
But suppose that some countries have emissions rules and others don't. As a result, the companies that want to burn coal move to the countries where they're allowed to do it. Now the amount of emissions does depend on where the factories are. But if the country where they are had the same emissions rules then they would be less competitive -- and so they choose to attract a disproportionate share of the manufacturing to a place that uses dirty power. That's definitely a choice -- compare it to the outcome where every country stops burning coal.
Do you know how South Australia solved a problem of the Whyalla Steelworks when transitioning to 100% renewable electricity? They excluded on-site generation of the plant from the statistics. "Solarization" of the plant hadn't worked out economically. Continuous manufacturing processes have big problems with intermittent energy sources.
China is building tens of nuclear power plants though.
> Continuous manufacturing processes have big problems with intermittent energy sources.
Intermittent energy sources are predictable in aggregate. A fairly modest amount of storage to smooth things out and you can pretty reasonably get above 50% solar and wind. Make up a large chunk of the balance with nuclear and hydro and you're pretty close to 100%.
The last 10% is obviously the hardest, but what's the excuse for countries still doing majority fossil fuels?
> China is building tens of nuclear power plants though.
Trouble being they're still operating ~1200 coal power plants.
Predictability will not get a plant through the night by itself. BTW, it's about 7 units of wind energy to 1 unit of solar energy plus significant overcapacity plus increase of the grid transmission capacity plus additional measures for grid stabilization (like synchronous condensers) to get to a "fairly modest amount of storage."
> Trouble being they're still operating ~1200 coal power plants.
Yeah, it's because of the above points.
> BTW, it's about 7 units of wind energy to 1 unit of solar energy plus significant overcapacity plus increase of the grid transmission capacity plus additional measures for grid stabilization (like synchronous condensers) to get to a "fairly modest amount of storage."
No it doesn't. You install 12 hours worth of batteries at the factory and "there is no solar at night" is solved, and doing that is already cost competitive with coal on the majority of days.
The problem comes when generation is low not because it's night but because it's cloudy for an extended period of time. But that only happens a small minority of the time, and doesn't require you to burn fossil fuels the other 90% of the time.
You also don't need things like synchronous condensers when you're using a non-trivial amount of nuclear or hydro, neither of which is coal.
> Yeah, it's because of the above points.
Then how do so many other industrialized countries do it without that amount of coal?
Canada and Spain are each only ~22% fossil fuels. France is <5%. The UK is 31% and only 0.1% of that is coal.
> You install 12 hours worth of batteries at the factory
I literally laughed out loud, sorry. Providing baseload with BESS alone? That's rich. Literally. Extremely expensive. In addition to impractical amount of batteries it requires impractical overcapacity to compensate for seasonal variation.
> Then why is no other country burning that amount of coal?
China does about 30% of the world's industrial production and 40% of metal production, while having around 50% of world's coal power plants. They are working on it though. Many of their new coal plants are peaker plants.