JAKARTA - Google, which is owned by Alphabet, will invest more than 1 billion euros (Rp17.4 trillion) in the expansion of its data center campus in Finland. This is done to encourage the growth of the artificial intelligence (AI) business in Europe, Google said in a statement on Monday, May 20.
In recent years, many data centers have been located in Nordic countries due to the cooler climate, tax relief, and abundant availability of renewable energy in the region. However, Finnish neighbors such as Sweden and Norway have recently been increasingly critical of data center hosting, where some industry experts argue that Nordic countries should use their renewable energy for products such as green steel that could provide higher surplus value in the country.
However, Finland's wind capacity has increased so rapidly in recent years, by 75% to 5,677 megawatts by 2022 alone, so that on windy days, electricity prices fell to negative, according to industry statistics. Therefore, there is still renewable capacity available for data centers such as Google's, which acquires wind power in Finland under long-term contracts.
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Analysts believe data center power consumption will increase massively due to rapid AI-use growth, which Google also cited as one of the reasons behind its investment decisions, in addition to the already operating Hamina data center in Finland with 97% carbon-free energy.
"The heat coming out of our data center in Finland will be diverted to the district heating network in Hamina, covering local households, schools, and public service buildings," Google said in a statement. Google added that it aims to achieve net zero emissions across its entire operations and value chains by 2030.
In addition to investing in Finland, the search and cloud giant announced last month that it would build new data centers in the Netherlands and Belgium.
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