A criminal investigation is currently underway into Google’s artificial intelligence data center project in Finland, where 330 hectares of forest were felled.
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- Google subsidiary Tuike Finland cleared and drained 330 hectares of forest in Muhos for a data center.
- The company failed to carry out the necessary environmental impact studies before carrying out the logging.
- A preliminary police investigation based on “ambiguities and deficiencies in drainage and water management” is underway, although the results will not be known until 2027.
A preliminary police investigation is currently underway into Google’s clearing of a forest in Finland to make way for an artificial intelligence data center.
As The Guardian reports, the allegation is that Google subsidiary Tuike Finland cleared and drained 330 hectares of forest at the Muhos site before ensuring the necessary environmental impact assessments were completed.
Yle (Finland’s public broadcasting company) further reports that the police have said that the investigation focuses on alleged environmental damage, but that other possible charges could be added depending on the ongoing results.
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Finnish police said: “According to preliminary information, there have been ambiguities and deficiencies in drainage and water management at the construction site of Tuike Finland Oy’s data center project.”
However, the investigation will be far from a short process and will not be completed until sometime in 2027.
On October 14, construction work on the Muhos data center and also on a second data center in Kajaani-Otanmäki was halted. In both cases, the environmental assessments were apparently incomplete.
Antti Järvinen, country director of Google Finland, apologized for the forest clearing, but said Google had acted according to “the best understanding we had of the legislation at the time.”
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Some 400,000 trees have reportedly been cut down at both sites (250,000 of them in Muhos). As The Guardian makes clear in a separate report last week (via Tom’s Hardware), there are a lot of very unhappy Finns, as you can imagine.
Many of them question the construction of data centers and the AI gold rush, which is the driving force behind this activity. There appear to be few direct benefits to the people of the country where these projects are underway, with only a small number of local jobs created. As Jussi Kangasharju, professor of computer science at the University of Helsinki, points out: “There are really no benefits for Finland. They are international companies serving international customers. Data centers ultimately have little benefit for anyone except the data center operator.”
Others obviously worry about the impact on wildlife. Finnish conservationists tell us that the forest’s three-toed woodpeckers have been displaced, and The Guardian highlighted that in Otanmäki, wolves that had nowhere to go when the trees were cut down ended up arriving in a local village.
It will be some time before the criminal investigation is completed, as noted, but you can bet the results will be closely watched.
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