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Google Commits €13 Billion to Finland AI Infrastructure Powered by Nuclear Energy

Alphabet has announced it will invest at least €13 billion, about $15 billion, in AI infrastructure in Finland, its largest Nordic commitment, with construction planned for 2027 and 2028. To power it, Google signed a 22-year agreement to buy half the output of the Loviisa nuclear power plant from state-controlled utility Fortum, covering 2030 through 2049.

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A record Nordic bet on AI capacity

Google announced on Wednesday that it will invest at least €13 billion, roughly $15 billion, in AI infrastructure in Finland, a record commitment for the country and a clear marker in the global race for AI compute. Construction is planned for 2027 and 2028, and Finland's government estimates the build phase alone will contribute about €3.6 billion to Finnish GDP. The investment expands the data center campus Google has been growing since a €1 billion expansion announced in 2024, and the BBC describes it as the largest single investment Finland has received. [1] [2] [4]

The announcement lands in the same week China published a plan to multiply its national AI computing capacity sixfold by 2030 and Mistral raised €3 billion for European open-weight AI. Europe has spent the year watching compute concentrate in the United States and China; a hyperscaler committing this much inside the EU matters for where the next generation of models gets trained. [3]

The nuclear deal is the real signal

The more distinctive piece is power. Google signed a 22-year power purchase agreement with Fortum, Finland's state-controlled utility, to buy half the output of the Loviisa nuclear power plant from 2030 through 2049. In plain terms, Google has locked in a guaranteed supply of clean baseload electricity for two decades to run AI infrastructure. [2] [3]

Data centers are becoming the world's most demanding electricity customers, and AI training clusters cannot tolerate intermittent supply. Buying a nuclear plant's output directly solves both problems at once, and it follows a pattern: Google and its rivals have been signing nuclear and renewables deals for years as AI load forecasts climb. Finland's grid and political stability make it a natural host, and the Loviisa agreement runs to 2049, longer than most data center hardware will survive. [2] [4]

Why this matters beyond Finland

For AI users, the compute race has an unglamorous constraint: power. Model quality improvements this decade have tracked access to electricity-backed GPU capacity, and deals like this one are how that capacity gets built in practice. Europe securing a hyperscaler-scale project matters for latency, data residency, and the practical option of serving European users from European soil, themes that have run through the EU's sovereignty debate all year. [1] [4]

There is also a competitive reading. China answered its compute question with a state-directed plan targeting 9,800 EFLOPS by 2030. Europe's answer, for now, is tax-friendly deals with US hyperscalers plus a homegrown open-weight champion freshly armed with €3 billion. Whether that combination keeps European AI workloads in Europe is the question the next two years will answer. [3] [5]

Sources

  1. Google to invest $15 billion in AI infrastructure in FinlandReuters via AOL
  2. Google to invest $15 billion in data centers and infrastructure in FinlandThe Wall Street Journal
  3. China targets fourfold boost in AI computing capacity by 2030 in major tech pushSouth China Morning Post
  4. Google to fund Finnish AI with €13bn investmentBBC
  5. Mistral raises €3 billion to push sovereign open-weight AIMistral AI

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