Finland’s Licensing and Supervision Agency has ordered Google to stop clearing massive forests for two data center projects until environmental impact assessments are completed.
CNBC reports that the Finnish agency, known as LVV, issued the order Tuesday in a notice sent to Google subsidiary Tuike Finland Oy. It covers projects in Muhos and Kajaani and stays in effect until the assessments are done. Google has until October 23 to stop work.
Finnish newspaper Kaleva previously reported that Google had cleared 300 hectares of forestland, equivalent to approximately 500 football fields, for two data center projects without environmental impact studies that were underway being completed first.
Per a translation of LVV’s press release, the suspension applies to tree removal, topsoil removal, excavation, quarrying, crushing, transfer of soil masses, ditching, and construction of roads and storage areas. It doesn’t cover planning, measurements, soil surveys, or other activities considered to have minor or easily reversible effects.
Tommi Muilu, head of the environmental department at LVV, laid out the agency’s reasoning: “In our opinion, the measures in question will change the environment and cause impacts, the identification and assessment of which are among the key objectives of the EIA procedure.”
Google didn’t dispute the order. “We understand the concerns and have fallen short of our own high standards in this instance,” a company spokesperson told CNBC, while defending its earlier conduct: “We acted in good faith under the Forestry Act, and ran nature surveys and put in place measures to protect high-value areas.”
The company says its environmental work in the region hasn’t stopped. “As we continue our long-term work in the region, we are advancing our landscaping and biodiversity plans, which include tree planting across 130 hectares at Muhos,” the spokesperson said.
The timing is awkward. About a month ago, Google pledged $15 billion toward AI infrastructure in Finland, its largest investment in Europe, with money set to flow through 2028 into data centers and related energy projects.
Finland has picked up the nickname “Texas of Europe” as the data center and AI boom spreads, thanks to its cheap land and spare power capacity. Texas itself is still one of the biggest AI data center hubs in the world, hosting projects from Google, Meta, Microsoft, and Anthropic. Finland has seen its own wave of announcements lately, with several proposed data centers reportedly capable of drawing hundreds of megawatts.
Breitbart News previously reported that $68 billion in data center projects have been delayed over the past three months:
The projects, tracked by Data Center Watch, a project of the AI intelligence company 10a Labs, made up more than half of all new large-scale developments the group monitored during that period. Data Center Watch’s lead analyst, Miquel Vila, said opposition to the industry is broadening. “New groups continue to emerge, opposition is appearing across a wide range of states and jurisdictions, and online petition signatures continue to grow,” he said.
The numbers back that up. Data Center Watch counted 843 opposition groups spread across 49 states; Hawaii is the only state without one. About 30 statehouses have introduced or adopted rules covering data center siting, electricity use or water consumption. In Tennessee, a petition against a single data center project drew more than 500,000 signatures on Change.org, more than a third of all signatures collected on the platform that quarter, according to Data Center Watch.
AI data centers and the integration of this technology is changing the political landscape. Breitbart News social media director Wynton Hall has written his New York Times bestseller Code Red: The Left, the Right, China, and the Race to Control AI to serve as the definitive guide on how the MAGA movement can create positions on AI that benefit humanity without handing control of our nation to the leftists of Silicon Valley or allowing the Chinese to take over the world.
Read more at CNBC here.
Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of AI, free speech, and online censorship.