10 September 2026 -EBM Newsdesk Analysis.Brad Adams
Google is putting €13bn into Finland over the next two years, making it the company’s largest single investment in Europe and one of the clearest signs yet that the AI race is becoming a contest over electricity, land and infrastructure as much as software.
The investment will expand data-centre capacity and supporting digital infrastructure across Hamina, Kajaani, Muhos and Vaala, while Google is also committing capital to clean energy, grid resilience, battery storage, biodiversity and workforce development. Construction is planned for 2027 and 2028. Google says the investment will support more than 37,000 jobs during construction and around 7,000 jobs annually once the facilities are operational.
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SubscribeThe significance goes beyond Finland. Google is effectively choosing the Nordic energy model as one of the foundations for its next phase of AI expansion.
Why Finland?
The attraction is partly obvious. Finland has a cold climate, substantial renewable and nuclear power resources, extensive grid capacity and relatively low-carbon electricity. Data centres are among the most electricity-intensive pieces of infrastructure being built anywhere in the world, making reliable power increasingly as important as access to fibre or land.
Google already has a long-standing presence in Hamina, where it converted a former paper mill into a data centre in 2009. The site uses seawater for cooling and has developed heat-recovery infrastructure capable of supplying heat to the local district heating network. Google says its Hamina operations supported more than 600 Finnish suppliers between 2023 and 2025.
The Finnish expansion therefore fits a much bigger transformation in which AI data centres are becoming strategic infrastructure rather than simply another category of commercial property.
The energy arrangements are particularly revealing. Google has agreed a 22-year power purchase agreement with Fortum linked to the life extension of the Loviisa nuclear power plant, which currently provides around 10% of Finland’s electricity. Google will purchase up to half of the plant’s output between 2030 and 2049. It is also supporting new onshore wind capacity and a 94MW battery system near Kajaani.
In other words, Google is not simply building computers and then asking somebody else to find the electricity to run them. It is helping shape the energy infrastructure around them.
Europe’s AI Infrastructure Race
That is increasingly becoming the defining feature of the European AI investment cycle. The continent needs vastly more computing capacity, but building it requires power, grid connections and long-term energy certainty.
The scale of the spending is extraordinary. EBM has previously examined Europe’s AI data-centre boom, with hyperscalers, infrastructure funds and utilities increasingly competing for the same scarce resources.
Google’s Finnish commitment also follows enormous investments elsewhere in Europe. SoftBank has proposed up to €75bn of AI data-centre capacity in France, while European infrastructure investors are developing dedicated AI-ready platforms. The race is no longer about whether Europe will have AI infrastructure. It is about where that infrastructure will physically sit, who will own it and who will control the electricity behind it.
That creates an uncomfortable question about European digital sovereignty. Google may be building infrastructure inside Europe, but the strategic ownership, technology and economics remain largely American. EBM has examined the European AI sovereignty challenge before, and Finland demonstrates both the opportunity and the contradiction.
Europe can attract enormous private investment into AI infrastructure while still remaining dependent on US technology companies for much of the underlying compute.
Finland’s Strategic Advantage
For Finland, however, the deal represents a substantial economic opportunity. Google expects the construction programme alone to contribute an average €3.6bn annually to Finnish GDP during 2027–28. The company will also invest €31m in local communities, including funding for research and innovation, while AI training programmes are expected to equip more than 4,400 workers with new skills.
The deal reinforces a lesson explored in EBM’s analysis of Nordic data centres: in the AI economy, countries with abundant, reliable and relatively clean electricity have acquired a new industrial advantage.
That may ultimately prove more important than tax incentives or traditional technology clusters.
The New Geography of AI
Google’s €13bn commitment is therefore more than a Finnish investment story. It is a statement about where the next generation of European digital infrastructure can actually be built.
The winners in AI will not necessarily be the countries with the most ambitious strategies. Increasingly, they will be the countries capable of providing power, cooling, land, fibre and political certainty at scale.
Finland has quietly assembled much of that package.
Google has now put €13bn behind it. The question for the rest of Europe is whether it can offer something equally compelling before the next wave of AI infrastructure capital is committed elsewhere
