Google to buy half the output of a Finnish nuclear plant in €13bn AI push
Google will buy half the electricity of a nuclear power plant
Google will invest a record €13bn in Finland's AI infrastructure, funding three new data centres and expanding an existing one. A 22-year deal with Fortum secures up to 50% of the Loviisa nuclear plant's electricity. Finland's cool climate and low-carbon grid attract tech giants; TikTok also pledged $1bn this week. Google expects 37,000 construction jobs and a €3.6bn annual GDP boost.
This is Google's largest single investment in Europe and a testament to Finland's leadership in responsibly building AI infrastructure.
- Illotus
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.
- sien
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.
- wxw
> 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.
- linuxhansl
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.
- amelius
I guess Finland has strong geopolitical security motives here, to create more dependence of the US on them, like in Taiwan.
- joshdavham
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.
- gblargg
The power plant is about 1000 MW BTW.
- hadlock
Only because the power company won't let them buy all of it, because their finance team wants a diversified customer base