Google is illegaly cutting forest to build data centers
theguardian.com362 points by heyimada 8 hours ago
362 points by heyimada 8 hours ago
> Google said in a statement “we understand the concerns” and that it had “fallen short of our own high standards”.
But it wasn't their own high standards, it was a legal obligation that they neglected?
I hope in vain that the powers that be are able to punish them in a way they will actually feel...
This is an amusing little scandal, but it seems to be only a procedural issue. Assuming that Google has some basic competence, it selected locations where it's ultimately possible to build data centers while complying with all legal requirements.
My guess is that the government will eventually find that all requirements have been satisfied and let the projects move on. But because this is now a controversial issue, someone with the standing will very likely file a complaint. Then the projects will be stuck in administrative courts for a year or two.
> This is an amusing little scandal, but it seems to be only a procedural issue.
If you go out and illegally cut down a tree, that's not "only a procedural issue". They illegally logged 815 acres of forest.
Breaking the law is a procedural issue.
Logging a few hundred hectares was not a problem. Google could have done that without additional permits, if their intention was to plant a new forest afterwards. Environmental impact assessment was only necessary, because they intended to replace the forest with something else.
The key question is whether Google can comply with the law after the fact. If they complete the assessment and the government finds nothing that would prevent the construction of the data centers, the project can go on. Maybe there will be some minor sanctions, as well as some delays, as they didn't do things properly the first time. And even if there is something that prevents construction, Google can still probably comply by planting a new forest.
they illegally destroyed 815 acres of forest
> without completing an environmental impact assessment (EIA).
Because they didn't follow the procedure of first completing the EIA, which Google is surely familiar with, with all of their other datacenters/construction (especially ANYTHING in California, which was detrimentally bad until recently [1]).
[1] https://abc7news.com/post/gov-gavin-newsom-signs-new-bills-a...
be real, they will just pay off the local officials to pass zoning laws to make it all legal. As they have done across the states.
The environmental impact assessment requirement is a national law, and the national government is responsible for approving it. But since elections are coming and the issue has become controversial, the government coalition will happily ignore it and let administrators and judges sort it out. They have bigger things to worry about.
who is left at the EPA to review it?
The forest and Google datacenters in the article are not in the US.
Although we shouldn't forget that we can lose trees in the US in order to accommodate data centers too.
https://www.opb.org/article/2025/03/29/portland-general-elec...
https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/chestnut-grove-...
Its a pretty egregious procedural oversight if you want to chalk it up to that.
For sure this is being politicized, for example claiming that the area was reduced to sand due to an overheated data center market. But to clear the land before doing legally required environmental impact studies is a pretty obvious mistake, and frankly I'm not sure how you'd even have landed on a plan for land clearing before doing said study if its required. How would you know what areas to clear, for example?
Yeah, that is not procedural oversight. That's simply not following the law, plain and simple.
> I hope in vain that the powers that be are able to punish them in a way they will actually feel...
they have such an obscene amount of money that no fine would ever matter to them. Jail time would do the trick though. Billionaires and trillionaires can't buy days of their life back.
They phrase it briefly like that for maximum coverage
Pose your question to them and they can say "sure if you need to finish our statement with...high standards to follow law... you do you"
Subject = our high standards
Predicate = whatever context you want to store here
The punishment will almost certainly fall on the subcontractor they contracted this work to who cut corners and should know better about local law.
Ah yes the Amazon model. Cover your ass with subcontractor to take the fall, and make them so dependent on you that they unquestionably follow orders.
That way you can evade all sorts of labour and environmental laws and if it blows up you just pop the contractor and find a new one.
Considering prime minister Orpo has already been quite vocal about supporting these data centers (when concerns were raised about electricity prices rising which he assured they won't be) citing economic growth and job increase, I doubt Google receives any kind of hard hitting sanctions for this.
Obligatory reminder that Finland is the happiest country and is in fact considered by all metrics among the least corrupt nation in the world. /s
"Forest" is a polite way to refer to what appears to be a monoculture plantation. To restore the land properly it would probably be necessary to remove 80%+ of the trees to make space for seeding or planting a diverse range of other species. Possibly 100% if the monoculture species already planted is not endemic.
Google street view imagery of the site showing logging completed by June 2026 and logs waiting collection: [1]
Sentinel-2 L2A imagery from 2026-10-11 showing the logged area: [2]
[1] https://www.google.com.au/maps/place/91500+Tahvola,+Finland/...
[2] https://browser.dataspace.copernicus.eu/?zoom=15&lat=64.8369...
'"Forest" is a polite way to refer to what appears to be a monoculture plantation.' That would mean that Europe almost has no Forest according to you and there's nothing worth protecting?
Assuming that you're correct and it is a monoculture plantation, they did not remove trees to make space for planting other species, they removed trees to make space for a data center.
This is probably all native scots pine or norway spruce, as that is what almost all of finland's forests are, and they don't plant sitka spruce plantations there like they do in Ireland or other places in Europe.
That said, there's very little old growth forest in finland and this obviously is not old growth.
I'm curious though if you know, what other species you'd expect to see here if it was properly restored?
Either way, you need to complete the EIA. It'd probably show that this was, indeed, a good location for a DC. Not doing the assessment before starting to chop down the trees is the problem here, not that the forest is particularly ecologically valuable.
Finn here. Not really. You're allowed to log if you resow.
So this seems to be a calculated move: When permits pass, prep is done. Worth paying minor fines for jumping the gun. Permits don't pass, just resow. That's a well informed expected value calculation.
That's a bad calculation, if the risk model failed to account for a political scandal in a small country that's very proud of their tree plantations and deeply suspicious of megacaps. But even with that tail risk realizing the likely outcome is that permits pass and prep is done. People make some noise, you get some bad PR and pay more than anticipated. Might seem like not worth the costs in retrospect, but hardly a disaster.
I can tell you that this is, for better or worse, what a lot "forests" look like in Sweden (and I assume, Finland too). A large part of our forests are industriskog (industrial forest).
Great for the economy (in the short term), not great for biodiversity.
This one was probably planted up to 60 years ago after the previous felling. The biodiversity requirements surely were not any better back then.
Swede here too.
It's extremely depressing driving around in Swedens countryside now. There are little to no forests, it's all just tree plantations.
So this was like a tree farm, planted for the purpose of logging? I know we have areas like that here in the PNW of the US, don't know about Finland.
Finland is 75% covered with forrest out of which 97% is grown for the purpose of logging. This AI slop research, but it’s in the ballpark.
I think local governments should be regulating and zoning new data center construction in a way that forces them to rehabilitate old industrial brownfields. There’s plenty of land already spoiled by human activity that can be reused. No reason to be cleaning nature for a warehouse full of computers that could be built anywhere.
I like this thinking. But also: it's clear this is a monoculture wood crop, not a "forest".
So in fact, this IS brownfield development: changing one industrial land use (forest products) into another one.
Doesn't mean they can't do the paperwork correctly tho.
Why should that responsibility fall on data centers, specifically?
Because they want to move in and can afford it. Same reason that apartment complexes have to add greenspace or subsidized apartments as a condition of getting a zoning variance.
Because in a democratic society the people can decide who is responsible for what, that's the price of admission you pay to live in such a society.
That's just what the poster above decided, not "the people" / legislation. Key words "I think" in the comment. Asking that person why they are going after datacenters specifically is a valid question.
I'm one of those people and I don't understand why we would single out data centers, a largely clean industry, to clean up dirty, industrial areas.
Not that a data center would be better but calling a human made mono plantation a forest also seems a bit off.
> Google said in a statement “we understand the concerns” and that it had “fallen short of our own high standards”.
Apple said the same rhetorical non-apology apologetically, recently... about something??
I think it was their Siri. Apple Intelligence lags a lot behind competitors, and back during WWDC last year Craig made an announcement about how "Siri had fallen short of expectations".
Executives were the world's first slop slingers even before LLMs. No wonder they got infatuated so easily.
> Apple said the same rhetorical non-apology apologetically, recently... about something??
Entirely possible they were advised by the same crisis management firm like FGS Global or Brunswick Group.
There is a whole giant industry around pretending to be sorry effectively.
Google’s web page about the Muhos data center referenced in the article: https://datacenters.google/locations/muhos/
Ugly. They had the resources to make it beautiful and part of the environment instead they bulldozed it
Founders need to speak on this. If they've got time to get in the weeds on gemini, they've got time for this
> it would consider enforcement proceedings and a fine
Oh man they are going to consider a fine, that would probably be barely an inconvenience to google.
they gave them extra time to finish the dirty deeds
> the Finnish Licensing and Supervision Authority (LVV) said it had issued a notice to the company to “immediately suspend” – by 23 October at the latest
Fines are just there as a threat to make sure they're not behind on their (checks notes...what are they calling it these days again...oh that's right) PAC contributions.
These could be on the order of 300k trees, illegally cutting a tree in Germany could cost up to 50k euro, that sums up to 15B Euro. Bad math but it gives a perspective on the magnitude of not caring about the natural environment.
So like a days revenue for Google at an incalculable loss for the environment and living things ?
I'm of course against illegal logging, but in this case there was very little loss of the environment. These planted pine forests in the Nordics are not biodiversity hubs in any stretch of imagination. They do support life, but not much. It would be another matter altogether if this was an old growth forest. This one is more like just a procedural blunder.
Don’t be evil, unless there is billions of dollars involved
- Fell 330 hectares of forest for Data Center 1
- Fell 200 hectares of forest for Data Center 2
Big tech is the new O&G
Title is: Google told to halt work on datacentres in Finland over environmental concerns
Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49968324
What happened to „don’t be evil“?
"Don't be evil" went away when the purchased Doubleclick advertising company completed hollowing out the old "Don't be evil" Google from the inside out.
> If Google does not comply, IVV said it would consider enforcement proceedings and a fine.
Ah. A fine. That'll teach them.
(No wonder they ignored you.)
For reference, 330 hectares is 0.001% of Finland's forest cover.
*illegally
Imagine being in the thick of a global data center controversy and thinking this is a good idea
People sure love to hate datacenters. what we should build instead (or is it where?)
The answer can also be not building something. Its not like we have a set quota of building stuff that has to be allocated one way or another.
We’re in the middle of the next technological revolution and not building is our best bet? You could’ve said that about the green revolution we should have left the fertilizer in the ground cause now we have 10 billion people and all the problems that come with it.
So what, if we don't invent the technology tomorrow we will next year. It's not like the world stops turning if innovation slows down a bit. In fact a lot of people think it's going too fast now. Even a lot of people in the industry.
And we shouldn't have made so unsustainably many people, I really don't understand why people are still fussing about birth rates when environmental crises are piling up (and social ones too like cost of living/housing)
I know this is like 2 hops off topic now, but... There's no shortage of people worldwide, it's just that particular countries have issues with low birth rates.
On topic, yes the datacenter growth can be slower.
Seems this is becoming a frequent thing, all over:
"One of America’s Last Chestnut Groves Is About to Be Destroyed for a Data Center"
https://www.gadgetreview.com/one-of-americas-last-chestnut-g...
As someone who's seen how this sausage is made in another jurisdction I assume what's going on here is Google or the builder got some sort of statement from some board to the tune of "oh well because you checked whatever boxes we will exercise our discretionary authority to waive this for you, the exact opposite of what how we'd behave if you were some uppity peasant seeking to develop some petty land". Naturally there are some who don't like this have probably complained to the next authority up who's putting some scrutiny on the situation and whatever approval they were given has been rescinded and now they gotta do it the hard expensive way.
Or it might be one of those cases where the discretionary BS you can be put through is so onerous and capricious that the cheapest way to get it done is to bulldoze first, let the threats fly and use whatever legal maneuvering that gets you to wind up with a more favorable venue (the higher up you go the more friendly to industry permitting authorities tend to become).
It's better to pay a fine than to ask for permission and get turned down? yeah, probably.
Better for who?
It's certainly not better for you and me that Google is able to do whatever they want at the cost of a fine and nothing more
There is Ecosia, apparently. I don't recall which trackers (crawlers) it uses
It uses Bing.
It's typical greenwashing though. Plant a few trees so you don't have to feel bad about the energy use. But it's all short term monoculture forests they're planting. Not destroying the real forest we have left is the better option. But yeah that's hard, you can't claim that as a quick win and make a lot of money off of it.
These initiatives are so small that they don't make a dent in the actual problem and for every "green" kilowatt hour some other factory burns extra coal because there's no green capacity left.
All ecosia does is give people who are mildly environmentally conscious an excuse to not feel guilty, and making good money off it. It's just like the 2$ carbon offset fees on flights. No way that tiny amount actually offsets anything of course. It's just someone getting rich of absolving others' guilt.
When should we expect our corporate overlords to block out the sun just to fuck with us? [1]
Do no evil, right?
Don't be evil.
"Do no evil" is a functionally impossible standard. Subtle difference but it matters.
As an executive of a company, I can think of no reason to remove that as a value unless of course (checks notes) you are condoning and encouraging evil.
It wasn't removed. Common misconception; it got moved.
https://abc.xyz/investor/board-and-governance/google-code-of...
Search the page for the phrase.
Ok, it was moved to some place almost nobody sees it. Tbh I'm happy with that, cause it was a bad slogan. Anyone outside a very tight Google bubble saw it as something an evil company would obviously say.
That photo looks horrible. Of all places, why cut down a ton of trees to build a data center. I hope the trees were used to build housing for the homeless or something. Maybe a youth center at least?
I don’t know much about Findland, so maybe there are trees everywhere.
[flagged]
Fuck Google, seriously. Avoid as much as possible.
All this red tape just slows down innovation. There is too much of a compute shortage right now that we need to figure out how to accelerate datacenter build outs.
The computer shortage is about chips, which building datacenters doesn't help with
Is it really a shortage of chips and not datacenters? Nobody seems to accurately know this fact, just semiconductor companies saying were at future capacity for years.
It's a shortage of everything. Power, datacenters, chips, etc. If you don't see it now, just look at where estimates are projecting the demand in even a couple years.
If this is indicative of how people are actually thinking in the tech industry these days, then it's doomed. It will devour itself.
Old growth forest don't just come back.
I agree, and, want to point out this wasn't old growth forest. At least, none of the standing trees in the photos look like old growth. If it was, that would be a huge story, but it would have been very odd for Google to put a data center in old growth forest. Almost all of Finland is covered by managed/logged forests like this, so it's kind of inevitable if building a datacenter there that it is going to replace forest.
The same is true in much of the world actually, over half of the earth's surface was forested before humans started clearing it.
To no one's surprise Google has gone from 'Do no evil' to 'Do all the evil, develop new levels of evil and then do that as well'
That does seem a bit dramatic. What Google did here, assuming the reporting is true, is absolutely bad but it isn't unprecedented. I'm not sure how clearing land for a development would be considered a new level of evil.
That's not the most evil thing that Google has been doing. Setting up a global surveillance network comes to mind. And algorithm based engagement on things like YouTube. They've also led the industry monetisation of personal data.
I think the world would be a much better place if Google and it's peers had never existed.
This article seems like pretty typical Guardian clickbait and "data center hysteria". It isn't Google who is responsible; it is the primary contractor: Tuike Finland Oy.
Also, if this forest was being cut down to build an organic vegetable farm or preschool or petting zoo, would we be seeing the same headline? Not a chance in hell. This part is the most egregious reach to me:
> The Finnish Association for Nature Conservation said the sites had been reduced to “sand”
It was economic forest without any conservative value. You are allows to cut down trees on your own land.
If you cut down more than 200 hectares you need to make a statement about effects for the environment. Google cut down 300 at Muhos.
There will be no notable effects on environment because the site is economic forest or junk land, unles such environmental effect is made up by government officials to slow down Google.