Finland’s data centres and the €13 billion nobody is counting

If your only news from Finland this week was the number thirteen billion, you would be forgiven for thinking the Land of a Thousand Lakes had finally found something it wanted to shout about. On 9 September 2026 Google announced it will spend at least €13 billion here across 2027 and 2028, its largest single investment anywhere in Europe. Four towns get the money. They are Hamina, Kajaani, Muhos and Vaala.

The men who built the atomic bomb tried to warn the world. This drawn history shows what happened to them and why the people building AI are saying the same things now.

The Prime Minister, Petteri Orpo, called it a clear testament to Finland’s strengths, which is the sort of thing prime ministers are contractually obliged to say. The international press ran the story under a nickname Finland and Finns will not be happy about, the Texas of Europe.

Where the Texas comparison flatters and where it warns

The nickname is meant kindly. It means a gold rush, a boom, a place where the resource happens to be sitting under your feet. In Texas the resource was oil and then gas. Here it is cold air, a stable grid, hydro on the Oulujoki, a fleet of wind farms and two elderly but extremely well-behaved nuclear reactors at Loviisa. Data centres want cheap electricity and free cooling. Finland has a climate that provides the second one for most of the year without being asked.

Finland’s own consul general in Houston, Stefan Lindström, told Yle the problem was one of scale. Texas, he said, talks in a couple of hundred gigawatts. Finland talks in a few. Vili Lehdonvirta, a professor at Aalto University, told the same reporter that companies build in Texas largely because regulation there has had a Wild West feel to it, and that the backup power for its data centres is mostly gas turbines.

Follow the comparison a little further and it stops being a compliment altogether. Texas is also the place where a deregulated grid met a cold snap in February 2021 and the lights went out for millions of people. Texas is the cautionary tale about what happens when a state decides that being open for business is the same thing as having a policy. Finland’s grid is the opposite of Texas’s, tightly planned by a majority state-owned operator. That is precisely why the comparison should make Finns nervous rather than proud. The thing Texas got wrong was not its geology. It was its paperwork.

What was actually announced

Read that list again and watch the verbs, because the verbs are doing an enormous amount of unpaid labour. Google’s own blog post says that over 37,000 jobs will be supported. Not created. Supported is an economist’s word and it is a perfectly respectable one, but it counts the electrician, the electrician’s supplier, the café that sells the electrician a coffee and, if you run the multipliers generously enough, the person who roasts the beans. It is a measure of economic gravity, not of payroll.

Here is the payroll. Google’s existing Hamina “campus”, seventeen years after the company bought a dead paper mill and turned it into one of the most efficient data centres on the planet, employs around 400 people on Google’s own 2024 count, contractors included, or about 500 on the former mayor’s count this week. The gap between five hundred and thirty-seven thousand is where all the interesting questions live.

None of which makes the announcement dishonest. Construction booms are real and Google’s own estimate is that building four data centre campuses puts sixteen thousand people in high-vis jackets across the two years. The problem is not the number. The problem is that Finland has no independent version of it. The last serious economic study of Google’s Finnish footprint, covering 2009 to 2019, was produced by Copenhagen Economics and carried a disclosure at the end saying the study was commissioned by Google. It found €1.2 billion of investment supporting an average of 1,700 jobs a year. Its published summary gives no breakdown of direct, indirect and induced effects, which is the one breakdown that would let you tell a job from a ripple.

Two days later, Finland answered back

Here is the part I did not expect when I started writing this. The checking began almost immediately and the first sceptic in the room was Google.

On the day of the announcement Yle took Google’s claim about Finnish GDP and put it to Gemini, Google’s own artificial intelligence, then asked what it made of the arithmetic. Gemini did not hedge.

In the original Finnish, which is worth having because it is even flatter, the verdict reads “Väite on taloustieteellisesti ja mittakaavaltaan vahvasti paisuteltu sekä käsitteellisesti harhaanjohtava.” Yle then did the sensible thing and asked a human being. Sakari Lähdemäki, a senior researcher at Etla, the Research Institute of the Finnish Economy, replied that he was critical too, but not quite that critical.

His actual objection is better than Gemini’s, because it is specific. On Google’s own figures, roughly half of the €13 billion goes on chips and other equipment that have to be imported. Imports do not add anything to Finnish GDP. They are somebody else’s.

On the jobs, Lähdemäki said Google’s numbers looked more optimistic than something drawn up on the precautionary principle. Big Finnish construction projects run on a proportion of foreign labour that is probably quite substantial. Once a data centre is actually running it is so heavily automated that it needs very few people, which is a polite economist’s way of arriving at a few hundred.

He was also fair in the way the press release never is. Thirteen billion euros is about a fifth of everything invested in Finland in a year. Whatever you think of the modelling, that is a genuinely enormous sum on this country’s scale. Pretending otherwise would be silly.

The Prime Minister pushed back, and his complaint deserves an airing. “In public debate in Finland, the impact of data centres on employment is often underestimated,” Orpo said. “I find this peculiar in a country that has struggled with high unemployment for a long time.” He is not wrong that a country with Finland’s jobless figures, over which his government presided, cannot afford to sniff at sixteen thousand construction jobs. He simply has not explained who will check, afterwards, whether sixteen thousand is what turned up.

The bit that is not in the press release

This is the part that should have led every story this week. It led none of them. The €13 billion announcement is not the first time Google has announced these towns.

Nobody has done anything improper here. A company paused an investment when the tax treatment changed. A government promised a new incentive. The incentive stalled in the ministry and then died. The company came back anyway. That last part is the interesting bit. On 1 September, at its budget review, the government scrapped the €30 million replacement subsidy it had promised in December. The Prime Minister’s reason was that in a broader picture starting with energy sufficiency, it was no longer a priority. Eight days later Google announced €13 billion. Either the tax break Google walked out over never mattered, or something else was on the table. The public has not been told which.

Finland’s own Finance Minister, Riikka Purra, put it more bluntly. Presenting the government’s own tax bill to parliament on 4 November 2025, she asked whether the taxpayer ought to be subsidising crypto mining, applications of dubious security or the computation of pornography. She noted that the single data centre complex planned for Forssa might consume around half the output of Olkiluoto 3. In September the government dropped the subsidy she was complaining about, eight days before Google came back.

The electricity question nobody wants to own

Here is the number that ought to be on the front page of every Finnish newspaper. It is not. By July 2026 Fingrid, the state grid operator, had received cumulative grid connection enquiries totalling 145 gigawatts. Roughly a hundred of those gigawatts are data centre projects. Finland’s all-time peak electricity demand, set on 8 January this year, was 15.6 gigawatts.

Most of those enquiries will evaporate. Everyone in the industry knows this and developers file grid applications the way people once filed planning applications, to make a field look like an opportunity. But by mid August the data centre projects that had gone further and signed a connection agreement with Fingrid came to nearly 5 gigawatts, almost five times the capacity of the entire Loviisa nuclear power station. The consultancy AFRY has modelled what that kind of growth does to prices, for the government’s own data centre roadmap. It compared 1,200 megawatts of data centre capacity in 2030 with 2,500, with new wind built to match in both cases. Run as inflexible baseload, the bigger number raises Finland’s average annual electricity price by more than ten per cent.

Ireland ran this experiment already. Data centres used 22 per cent of Ireland’s metered electricity in 2024, up from five per cent in 2015, and in December 2025 the Irish regulator ruled that new data centres must bring their own generation or storage and cover at least 80 per cent of their demand with new Irish renewables. Finland is watching this happen in a fellow EU member state. Its response so far has been to promise a subsidy, stall it and then scrap it, in that order.

An independent census published by the Digital Economic Security Lab last September found 40 operational data centre sites in Finland already, with verified peak capacity of 379.5 megawatts across the 22 sites that would disclose it and an estimated total near a gigawatt. Actual consumption is lower than the peak suggests. The government’s own data centre roadmap put it at about 1.6 terawatt hours in 2024, just under two per cent of everything Finland uses, and the industry expects five to six terawatt hours by 2030. The census also found that operators barely adjust their consumption when prices move, which matters in a country whose spot price went negative for more hours in 2024 than any other market in Europe. Fingrid has proposed, in grid rules now out for consultation, that large data centres be able to cut thirty per cent of their load within fifteen minutes when asked.

The politics has moved faster than the concrete will. Antti Kaikkonen, who leads the Centre Party, responded to the Google announcement by calling for a national permitting system for data centre investments, then said the quiet part out loud.

Back in June, months before any of this, a Coalition Party MP called Heikki Vestman tabled a bill requiring data centres to cover their own consumption by building or buying new generation inside Finland.

And when Yle asked three municipal leaders about the electricity consequences of the data centres they are approving, the answers arrived with a kind of beautiful, unbroken circularity. Forssa’s mayor said Fingrid has promised there will be enough electricity and that the project has no impact on prices. Lahti’s mayor acknowledged residents were worried but said the matter is not in the city’s hands. Janakkala’s municipal director asked what the reason would be to say no, then explained that the municipality handles zoning and environmental permits, not electricity supply. Every decision maker in the chain is entirely confident that somebody else is holding the rope.

Credit where it is genuinely due

Now hold that 40 gigawatt hours next to the 1.6 terawatt hours that Finnish data centres consumed in 2024. It is two and a half per cent. The single most celebrated waste heat project in the country, the one that appears in every ministerial speech and every press release including this one, warms a pleasant town of nineteen thousand people and rounds to very little at national scale. That is not Google’s fault. It is a fact about thermodynamics and about how far you can economically pipe lukewarm water. But it is the difference between a proof of concept and a policy. Finland keeps quoting it as though it were the second one.

The Loviisa deal deserves the same treatment. Fortum says the twenty-two year agreement gives it the revenue certainty to complete a €1 billion investment programme and enables a further 10 megawatt uprate. That is credible. But the operating licence extending Loviisa to 2050 was granted by the Finnish government in 2023, three years before Google signed anything. The plant was not saved this week. A billion-euro refurbishment already under way was de-risked, which is a good and useful thing. It is also a different thing.

So who is actually keeping score

The counting, as we have seen, started within about six hours. It was sharper than I expected. What has not started is the accounting. There is a difference between the two and the difference is the whole point.

Both are commentary. Both will have vanished from the news cycle inside a fortnight. Neither of them creates any obligation on anybody to go back in 2029 and check.

A registration obligation was agreed alongside the subsidy in December 2025, one that would finally give Finnish authorities a comprehensive picture of what is being built and how much of the grid it wants. Whether it survives the subsidy it was attached to is not something the reports of the budget review addressed, and the December announcement never said whether the register would be public. There is also the EU Energy Efficiency Directive, whose Article 12 now requires every data centre with at least 500 kilowatts of installed IT power to report annually to the European Database on Data Centres. Its delegated regulation specifies a set of indicators including power usage effectiveness, water usage, waste heat reuse and renewable energy share. That database is the single most useful accountability instrument in existence and hardly anyone in Finland has mentioned it.

What does not exist anywhere is the retrospective. No Finnish institution has published a document that goes back to 2024, quotes what was said about jobs in Kajaani and Muhos in November 2024 and sets it beside what actually arrived. Nobody has audited a supported-jobs figure against a payroll. Nobody has gone back to the municipalities that signed the first wave of letters of intent and asked what the waste heat commitment turned into. The Finnish state has an unusually good record of measuring things. On this it has simply not started.

Which brings us to the only part of this that is any use to you.

What you can actually do about it

The country that fills in the form

I do not know whether this is a good deal for Finland. I want to be precise about that, because it is not modesty and it is not fence-sitting. It is what several days on the public record actually produces. The numbers that would settle the question have not been assembled by anybody. The organisation holding most of them is the one making the announcement. The few independent figures that exist were gathered by a small research lab, an economist answering his phone and a couple of journalists, rather than by the state.

That is the finding. Not that Finland is being fleeced, and not that Finland is being saved. It is that a country which is quite exceptionally good at measuring things has decided this particular thing does not need measuring. This is a nation where somebody started writing down the date the ice broke on the Torne river in 1693, and somebody has written it down every spring since. It is also a country that publishes everyone’s taxable income every November and has the highest earners in the newspapers by lunchtime. The machinery for holding a multinational to a promise is sitting right there, fully built, extremely Finnish and currently switched off.

Thirty-seven thousand jobs is a testable claim. Eighty per cent of a town’s heating is a testable claim. So is whatever changed in the eight days between the subsidy dying and Google saying yes. So is every megawatt in that connection queue. Somebody just has to be given the job of checking, then allowed to publish the answer. The question is who?

Sources

The charts in this piece are free to republish with a credit and a link to this page. Every figure in them comes from the sources below.

1. Google, Google Deepens Commitment to Finland with Two-Year €13 Billion Investment in AI Infrastructure, 9 September 2026.
2. Yle, Google lupaa, että sen jätti-investoinnilla saadaan yli prosentin kasvu bkt:hen – asiantuntija toppuuttelee, 9 September 2026. The Gemini verdict and Sakari Lähdemäki’s response.
3. Yle, Etlan asiantuntija: Googlen datakeskushankkeiden työllisyysvaikutukset yläkanttiin arvioituja, on the employment estimates.
4. Yle, Google investoi Suomeen 13 miljardia – suurin Euroopan-panostus, mukana myös ydinvoimaa, 9 September 2026, including Prime Minister Orpo’s remarks on employment.
5. Kokoomus parliamentary group, Over 100 MPs back Vestman’s data centre bill.
6. Yle, HS: Google puts plans for Finnish data centre expansion on ice, 23 October 2025.
7. Finnish Government, Ministerial Committee on Economic Policy decides on state aid for data centres and registration obligation, 5 December 2025.
8. Suomen Kuvalehti, Suomen sähköverkon halutaan kasvavan täysin ennennäkemättömästi, on Fingrid’s connection queue and the AFRY price modelling.
9. Yle, Miksi sanoisimme ei, kysyy kunnanjohtaja, on municipal leaders in Forssa, Lahti and Janakkala.
10. Digital Economic Security Lab, Finnish Data Centre Census 2025.
11. Copenhagen Economics, Inside Finland, Google’s European hyperscale data centres, commissioned by Google.
12. Fortum, Lifetime extension of the Loviisa nuclear power plant, licensed to 2050 in 2023.
13. White & Case, Data centres and energy consumption, evolving EU regulatory landscape, on Article 12 and Delegated Regulation 2024/1364.
14. Borenius, Government prepares new grid connection priority rules, 26 August 2026.
15. Yle, Ylen lähteet vahvistavat: Datakeskuksille ei tule uutta tukea, 1 September 2026, on the budget review scrapping the replacement subsidy.
16. SSS, Purra: Datakeskuksille suunnitellusta verotuesta luovutaan, 1 September 2026, with Prime Minister Orpo’s stated reason.
17. MTV Uutiset, Datakeskustuen piti tulla voimaan heinäkuussa – päätös jumittaa ministeriössä, 30 June 2026, on the subsidy stalling.
18. Yle, Datakeskuksille uusi tuki – kiistelty lakiesitys datakeskusten sähköverotuen poistosta eteni, on the electricity tax rates and the €47 million value of the old relief.
19. Demokraatti, Purra: On syytä pohtia, tarvitsevatko maailman rikkaimmat suuryritykset veronmaksajan selkänahasta raavittua verotukea, 4 November 2025.
20. Haminan Energia, Googlen datakeskuksen lämpöä alkaa virrata Haminan kaukolämpöverkossa vuoden 2025 aikana, on the heat pump plant, 40 GWh and 2,000 households.
21. Google, Data centre efficiency, Hamina trailing twelve-month PUE of 1.10, Q4 2025.
22. EUR-Lex, Commission Delegated Regulation (EU) 2024/1364 of 14 March 2024, the 500 kW threshold and the European database on data centres.
23. Yle, Datakeskuspiirit vertaavat nyt Suomea Texasiin – kysyimme asiantuntijoilta, mitä mieltä he ovat väitteestä, September 2026, with Stefan Lindström and Vili Lehdonvirta on the Texas comparison.
24. Euronews, Google to invest €13bn in Finnish AI data centres, 9 September 2026, with Prime Minister Orpo’s testament remark and the 16,000 construction jobs.
25. Yle, Etlan asiantuntija: Googlen datakeskushankkeiden työllisyysvaikutukset yläkanttiin arvioituja, September 2026, on foreign labour and automation.
26. Yle, Google osti paperitehtaan Haminasta yli 15 vuotta sitten, September 2026, with the former mayor’s figure of about 500 people at Hamina.
27. Business Finland, Google announced an expansion of its Hamina data center and a new heat recovery project, 2024, with Google’s figure of around 400 people in full time and contractor roles.
28. Finnish Government, Government grants Metsähallitus permission to sell land areas to Google in Muhos and Kajaani, 28 November 2024, 1,400 hectares for over €27 million.
29. Yle, Google plans historic data centre expansion in Finland, 28 November 2024.
30. Yle, Hallitus aikoo tehdä datakeskuksille kymmenen vuoden veronpalautustuen, 5 December 2025.
31. Yle, Valtion korkomenot ovat ensi vuonna 4,3 miljardia euroa – uusi datakeskustuki puuttuu Riikka Purran ehdotuksesta, 4 August 2026, on the stalled subsidy and its €30 million annual cost.
32. Fingrid, Sähkönkulutus nousi Suomessa kaikkien aikojen ennätystasolle, 8 January 2026, the 15,553 MW record, also reported by SSS.
33. Fingrid, Electricity consumption is set to increase sharply, 18 August 2026, nearly 5 GW of data centre projects with connection agreements and the nearly 40 per cent figure.
34. Fingrid, Fingrid-konsernin puolivuosikatsaus 1.1.–30.6.2026, 23 July 2026.
35. Ilkka-Pohjalainen, Datakeskuksiin hurjat 100 GW:n alustavat kyselyt, paljastaa Fingrid Vaasassa, 12 August 2026.
36. Yle, Etelä-Suomen sähköverkko ei kestä kaikkia datakeskushankkeita, April 2025, on the southern grid constraints.
37. Finnish Government, Datakeskusten kansallinen tiekartta, selvityshenkilön raportti, Valtioneuvoston julkaisuja 2025:94, with the 1.6 TWh consumption figure for 2024 and the AFRY price modelling.
38. Central Statistics Office, Ireland, Data Centres Metered Electricity Consumption 2024, also reported by the Irish Times.
39. Commission for Regulation of Utilities, Ireland, CRU publishes its decision on new electricity connection policy for data centres, 12 December 2025, also reported by RTÉ.
40. Vattenfall, Suomi johtaa tätä eurooppalaista sähkötilastoa, March 2025, 725 negative-price hours in 2024, the most in Europe, also in the IEA’s Electricity 2025 report.
41. Yle, Lakialoite: Datakeskusten tulisi rakentaa tai ostaa uutta sähköntuotantoa Suomeen, June 2026.
42. Suomen Keskusta, Kaikkonen: Datakeskusbuumi otettava hallintaan, September 2026, also reported by Demokraatti.
43. Ministry of Economic Affairs and Employment, Ministeri Multala: hallitus valmistelee lakiesitystä sähköjärjestelmän kestävyyden varmistamiseksi, on the grid connection priority rules due this autumn.
44. Fortum, Fortum and Google sign nuclear power purchase agreement, 9 September 2026, also reported by World Nuclear News.
45. Nohewa, Heat recovery for Haminan Energia and Google data center in Hamina, the 40 GWh and 2,000 households figures.
46. The Cryosphere, Tricentennial trends in spring ice break-ups on three rivers in northern Europe, 2022, the Torne record from 1693, also at GRID-Arendal.
47. University of Texas Energy Institute, ERCOT Blackout 2021, more than 4.5 million homes without power, also reported by the Texas Tribune.