Google commits €13 billion to Finland AI buildout, signs 22-year nuclear power deal

Google announced plans on September 9 to invest at least €13 billion ($15.1 billion) into AI infrastructure in Finland — the single largest European investment in the company's history. The capital will be deployed across 2027 and 2028, funding data centers and supporting infrastructure at four sites: Hamina, Kajaani, Muhos, and Vaala.

The scale of the investment matters, but the more structurally significant piece is how Google is powering it. The company signed a 22-year life-extension power purchase agreement with Finnish energy company Fortum for the Loviisa nuclear power plant, which currently supplies roughly 10% of Finland's electricity. Without the deal, Loviisa would not have been able to continue operating beyond 2030. It's Google's first nuclear energy agreement outside the United States, and the first deal of its kind in Europe.

Why a hyperscaler is propping up a nuclear plant

The agreement will help unlock €1 billion of investment needed to keep Loviisa running for decades. In effect, Google is trading a long-term, contracted demand commitment for guaranteed baseload power — a structure increasingly common as AI data center electricity demand outpaces what intermittent renewable capacity alone can reliably supply. Nuclear's advantage for this use case is consistency: unlike wind or solar, a nuclear plant provides steady output regardless of weather, which matters enormously for facilities that can't tolerate power interruptions.

Google isn't relying on nuclear alone. The company also announced new onshore wind power purchase agreements with Valorem and Suomen Hyötytuuli, bringing its total contracted new-to-the-grid onshore wind capacity in Finland to 629 MW, plus a 94 MW battery storage system near the Kajaani site expected online in late 2027. The combination — nuclear baseload, wind capacity, and battery storage — reflects the emerging playbook for powering AI infrastructure at gigawatt scale without simply drawing down existing grid capacity that other consumers depend on.

Economic impact and local pushback

During construction, Google's investment is projected to contribute an average of €3.6 billion annually to Finland's GDP and support more than 37,000 jobs. Once operational, the facilities are expected to sustain 7,000 jobs annually at wages averaging 24% above Finland's median. Those numbers are significant for a country of Finland's size.

Not everyone is celebrating. Opposition figures in Finland have warned that committing a meaningful share of the country's nuclear baseload capacity to a single foreign tech company's data centers for more than two decades risks straining domestic power supply, particularly if Finnish electricity demand grows faster than currently projected. The tension is a preview of a broader question facing countries courting AI infrastructure investment: how much of a nation's power generation capacity should be contractually committed to a single hyperscaler's needs.

Part of a bigger pattern

Google's Finland deal follows a broader trend of AI companies signing direct power purchase agreements with nuclear operators — Microsoft's Three Mile Island restart deal and Amazon's Talen Energy agreement in the US being the most prominent prior examples. What distinguishes the Finland deal is its explicit life-extension structure: rather than simply buying output from an already-operating plant, Google's commitment is what makes continued operation of Loviisa financially viable in the first place.

Source: Bloomberg: Google Gives a 20-Year Lifeline to Nordic Nuclear Power Plant