Google will buy half the electricity from one of Finland's nuclear power plants

At least Sweden is struggling a lot with scaling its power production, to the point where it's a problem for existing and new industries and causing some rather extreme price volatility.

A lot of the green energy is from hydro dams and you can't really add new rivers to the geography to support additional industry.

    > Sweden is struggling a lot with scaling its power production, to the point where it's a problem for existing and new industries

Don't forget Iceland as they have renewable energy and loads of it. Many data centres are rising as we speak from top firms as well.

France recently announced for €93B of data center contracts to be deployed in the next few years.

The countries that could decarbonize their electricity all rely on nuclear, hydro or geotherm.

Here in Norway we already have issues with volatile and high electricity prices, because:

1) We're not expanding hydropower generation very much. We can upgrade existing dams for improved efficiency, but no new dams are being planned, because it's politically and environmentally arduous to do so. There's some wind buildout, but that's also a political quagmire due to nimbyism. Nuclear isn't even close to having a political consensus behind it, and even if it did, it would take years. And our geography is uniquely ill suited for solar.

2) Winters have less and less snow, summers have less and less rain, leading to issues filling reservoirs. This will only get worse in the future.

3) The north has a surplus, but the infrastructure for transferring it to the south is underdeveloped

4) lots of the electricity we generate is being sold to central Europe to compensate for Germany's idiotic decision to shut down their nuclear reactors and Trump's idiotic decision to send oil prices over $100

Unfortunately data centres are currently being built, which depresses me. Because who will use them? Giant American tech companies will use them, to lobotomise our youth, poison our political discourse and steal our personal data. Fuck that.

Data centres also create very few jobs beyond the initial construction phase. Overall it's a very, very bad deal for Norway as a nation.

Unless the next drought forces a shutdown of the power plant again

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A customer willing to make a multi-decade deal for half a reactor at a stable price is perfect for incentivizing new nuclear buildouts. The basic financial problem of nuclear is that it' capex heavy and opex-light, so the costs of the entire enterprise are set during the buildout stage, but the revenue is volatile.

It is worth noting that Finland is a member of Nord Pool (for electricity) which includes all Nordic nations. You cannot consider Finland alone in your supply and consumption expectations -- you need to include Norway, Sweden, Denmark, and Finland. Both Norway and Sweden have massive annual electricity exports exceeding 30 TWh for each country. 60 TWh is the equivalent of four EPR nuclear power units that can produce about 14 THw per year! That is crazy over capacity in my view. The block has plenty of supply.

Further, the article specifically says:

    > Google signed a 22-year contract with Finnish utility Fortum to buy up to 50% of the output from the Loviisa nuclear power plant.

That nuclear power plant has two reactors that each produce about 8 TWh in total per year. So Google bought 4 TWh per year. Meh, no biggie. The Nordic Pool has plenty of capacity.

> they aren't allowing these datacenters to raise electricity price

If you reduce supply,price generally goes up. Buying a power plants output reduces supply

POV: you know nothing about how energy market works.

Not only disappointing such comments exist on HN, but to be at top is depressing.

I hope the data center's waste heat can be used for some form of district heating! Finland has pretty great municipal infrastructure, but I don't know enough about its heating systems.

Relatively uncongested…for now

Up to 50%

Finnish regulators are not better than American counterparts. This deal long time cost will be most likely paid by us common folk.

It is common trend currently here in Finland due to economic situations that data centers can basically get cheap electricity deals and common folks pay it.

I feel this will not end well… if we don’t continue building nuclear. I hope this will force us to continue building asap.

It reminds me of "640KB of RAM is enough for everyone". Look where we are right now. We always find a way to spend resources. I was frustrated with my last laptop because of frequent swapping/OOM, so I built a desktop with 64GB RAM during covid. I thought I would never have this problem again, I even disabled swap. Now I regret I didn't get 128GB instead to fit bigger local LLMs. But even without LLMs, my Firefox crashed with OOM just yesterday. Apparently I open too many tabs too quickly.

I used to think "wow, ADSL is so fast, I will never need faster internet connection" and now I need fiber to sync 500GB dataset fast enough so I don't get frustrated. Gosh, I remember the feeling when I upgraded from 14.4k to 56k dialup modem.

The trillon dollars question is more, will the current GPUs still be relevant in 3 years? 5? 10?

Will incredibly efficient new GPUs appear? will custom ASIC, models burned in silicons, take off? Will unified memory systems become usable?

The datacenter bets are that things will mostly continue like now, and that these GPUs won’t depreciate too much.

For now theses bets are self-fulfilling, causing hardware to even appreciate.

The (naive or forward thinking depending on your opinion) is that cheaper 'inference' will result in more demand, like the more efficient Watt steam engine increasing consumption of coal.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

I predict that within 100 years, data centers will be twice as powerful, ten thousand times larger, and so expensive that only the 5 richest kings of Europe will own them

Probably yes, and if not, it can most likely be repurposed

We will all be happy with our local inference, but how will our overloards be able to surveil and control us en-masse without them?

It's a big bet to not have a plan for needing power.

I expect as LLMs penetrate further, we'll see much more of it, continually running, and doing more 3D work.

Energy usage for computing by humanity will only go up with time. It should be obvious that most of our energy will go to computing for anyone who's worked with computers. At some point you exhaust the kinds of things you can do in the physical world, but you can compute infinitely. There's limits to where you can go but not to what you can think about.

You can now melt polar ice directly with your AI prompts.

> mainly produce consumer software to serve ads

Pretty reductionist. I don't know about tiktok, but Google does a lot more than serve ads

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Missed opportunity for it to be 1.21 GW. I'm sure they can add another reactor.

The plant mentioned in the article is by no means new, its two reactors began operation in 1977 and 1981, respectively (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loviisa_Nuclear_Power_Plant).

Nuclear power plants are notorious for their long planning, approval and build times (and cost overruns). Then again, I wouldn't want to live near a nuclear power plant built as fast as a data center either...

in ur backyard not mine thx

If a community's usage is say 60% of what a plant can produce, and $TECH_GIANT comes and buys the other 40%, what happens next?

Power prices will go up, since any growth will exceed the available power generation capacity. Power will become dirtier, since diesel generators will fill in when there is high demand. Then the community will spend a huge amount of money building out more capacity.

I think we will all soon see, communities sharing power infrastructure with massive-demand corporate customers will end badly for the communities.

I would go even further to say if we can get zero taxpayer dollars in funding, fair and equitable land costs, infrastructure paid for by the companies, and solid ecological plans that are leveraged on threat of removal (not fines), they could be a net good where they are built

Should this apply only to AI compute facilities or all industries?

I have no real evidence for this but I think a general principle of good governance is that the policy is agnostic to the industries which it affects and robust under any set of conditions, so for instance, the price that electric utilities charge should be enough to pay for expansions, either prospectively or retroactively (via loans secured before the construction, taken out against projected future revenue), rather than subsidizing the expansion with taxes collected by industries that won't be using the electricity, or exercising discretionary control over which types of industrial expansion are accommodated through investments in expanding the energy infrastructure.

Huge expansions of energy production have occurred in the past to meet growing demand for energy from then-emerging industries. And I'm not aware of any past campaigns to stop the various industries that needed energy on account of the allegation that their increase in energy usage would burden other sectors of society. I have concern that the treatment of AI compute facilities is based on public opinion rather than rule of law and consistent protection of private property rights.

Do you know the specific of which countries buying how much electricity from this plant, or just your wildly guess?

I think that’s a good thing, they could also build a nuclear reactor or two or three. Wouldn’t hurt.

NATO membership notwithstanding, I don't think anybody in Finland expects the US to ride to rescue if Russia invades.

I don't know, I always feel these companies (including governments) are selling this kind of contracts too cheap.

They are not used to the aggressiveness of FAANG negotiators, they treat them as friends.

Southern states have more republicans so it's easier to sell public land or draw this kind of contracts without a massive community backlash

Nuclear is the most expensive form of clean energy. It is likely to bankrupt at least one company.

When Finland contracted with France to build their latest reactor, they wisely had a fixed price contract where the French company would pay for const overruns. At groundbreaking in 2005, they planned for a 2009 completion. In 2016 it bankrupted Areva, with the French government owned EDG saving parts of the company crucial to the nation. It wasn't completed u tip 2023:

https://www.helsinkitimes.fi/finland/finland-news/domestic/2...

When the US last decided to build nuclear, Westinghouse AP1000s, two in South Carolina and two in Georgia, it resulted in the bankruptcy on Westinghouse, putting all of Toshiba, its owner, at risk:

https://www.csis.org/analysis/westinghouses-bankruptcy-and-i...

The two South Carolina reactors were abandoned at the cost of a substantial fraction of the build cost, in the billions, and utility executives went to jail for deception about it. Georgia finished its two reactors, but only by creating some of the most expensive electricity out there today.

Storage and renewables are cheaper, faster to deploy, and work really really really well in Texas and Arizona. Despite nearly free natural gas in Texas due its state as a by-product of oil extraction, most of the new electricity grid assets in Texas are wind, storage, and solar, and that's independent third party investors making those choice in the grid to make money, as Texas has perhaps the "freest" electricity market in the United States when it comes to who is allowed to build grid assets and make money off them.

If the far north places have hydro that's already built and not being used, that makes sense for data centers. But new nuclear is not a serious technology, it exists mostly based on vibes.

    > Unfortunately, the project was cancelled for moronic political reasons.

    > In March 2022, in light of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the Finnish Government declared that a rapid independence from Russian energy production is desired, and that the construction of the plant should not continue. Mika Lintilä, Finland's Minister of Economic Affairs, declared that he would not issue a construction permit.

Politics means putting job creating infrastructure projects in red states to curry favor with Republican demographics.

1. Cheap natural resource 2. Fiber connectivity 3. Low population density 4. Favorable regulatory environment

Depending on how far north you mean, you lose all or all but one of the above.

Perhaps the extra cost in freeze proofing certain systems and the inability to rely on evaporative cooling techniques? The availability of power in the winter might be a problem too when northern home's power and energy usage all ramp up. In the summer you need nearly the same amount of capacity for cooling as the south so there isn't much savings there.

Google claims that 10% of its power goes to non-computing overhead. Even if that were 0 somewhere else, ok how much more expensive is the power in that area, probably more than 11%. And I don't know how much they spend on power to begin with, relative to the other costs that probably go up.

Arizona is conducive to abundant solar power, so that'd be a good reason to build there. Similar deal here in Nevada (with the added bonus of Nevada being a giant blob of geothermal heat, further driving renewable energy supply and therefore datacenter attractiveness).

Traditionally you cared alot about internet connectivity and latency to your customer base. I imagine Texas comes out a lot better on that front.

That probably matters a lot less for AI.

* good access to power (this might not mean the cheapest always, but actually getting to it.

* easy permitting

* lots of space

If done correctly there’s a lot of free solar energy in sunny states.

Unions. Northeastern states expect that you will use union labor to build your projects or they will shut you down.

Pennsylvania, for example, was one of the few places to take Walmart to task for employing illegal labor.

Texas and Arizona are notoriously anti-union and anti-resident/pro-corporation.

Its pretty delusional to suggest that working nuclear plant was going to be decommissioned without this considering that electricity consumption is projected to rise rapidly. There currently is shortage of steady power in Finland so no nuclear plants are gonna be closed barring catastrophes.

> while screaming about conspiracies that data centers destroy H20 molecules

This is a gross misrepresentation of the concern. Clean fresh water is locally very important and a finite resource. The vast majority of people know it does not destroy H2O molecules, but moves them to a less useful space.

Not sure of their business split, but maybe it makes financial sense purely supporting their European customers.

Surely it makes more sense for European data to be stored in the more local datacentre?

Do you care to elaborate on what “this” is that is so bad?

And just out of curiosity, have you come to this opinion independently through your own research?

Or is this just regurgitated sentiment you’re memetically repeating to signal in-group status after consuming reactionary media/clickbait on this topic?

I don't choose to use all the AIs sites keep shoving at me.

If the consumers of AI aren't paying the marginal costs for the energy they're using, it's a market distortion and we won't have working market discovery of the actual cost performance of the AI. "Wow tokens are so cheap let's use AI for everything" meanwhile the costs are actually being hidden elsewhere.

> but continue to use AI

Not all humans

For over a decade, Google's been wearing the environmentally-friendly / carbon-neutral label as part of their public-facing brand values. It's definitely been eating into their CapEx then, and this isn't much different.

3a. AI companies make hyperbolic projections on the future use of AI and plan building and powering data centers according to that.

5. when the AI bubble bursts, we'll be left with huge amounts of unused/half-built data center capacity and unused power (with complications such as the data centers belonging to creditors and not being worth nearly as much as the inflated prices paid for building them).

The plant may be closed without this Google's order. The cost to keep it running is substantial. I guess that's what you prefer?

"The Finland deal will ensure that the Loviisa plant keeps operating beyond 2030, the companies said in a statement. Keeping it running until 2050 will require about €1 billion of investments over the years"

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-09-09/google-gi...

Finland doesn't get the rest of its power from coal, they're one of the greenest energy markets on the planet.

It's a market. Why can't someone buy it?

Why does it matter that homes "aren't clean" while Google is? That's silly. There's going to be the same level of demand no matter what - the same mix of coal and nuclear inputs will happen regardless of where the outflows are. It's fungible.

More demand will in time result in an increase in supply. That's a good thing. We'll be building a lot more, and it's long overdue.

Yes let's shame corporations for spending money on and supporting things that need more support. /s

1. Chernobyl disaster was not related in any way with nuclear plant normal functioning. It was "experiment of how low output reactor can go" proposed and exercised by people without knowledge or experience. It's monument of why government officials should not touch anything related to science

2. Chernobyl nuclear plant was very poor copy of safe by design nuclear plant. It had critical flaw in carbon based proton catching mechanism

3. Closed zone is currently habitable (except Sarcophagus area). You'll receive much higher radiation dose simply by flying to Norway. Nature is returning there, there're plans to repopulate it

4. This was in Soviet Union and power plant was "public". Most of the power plant in EU is public if not every single one. I don't have exact information on this topic

Please do not treat entire technology, which is safe, as a threat simply because some greedy, uneducated people from the past wanted better position and paid ultimate price for it

Chernobyl disaster was biggest nuclear accident, but not the biggest disaster related to energy production. In 1975 the failure of the Banqiao Reservoir Dam and other dams in Henan Province, China caused more casualties than any other dam failure in history. The disaster killed an estimated 171,000 people and 11 million people lost their homes. It's not much known in the West because various elements of the Chinese government concealed the details of the disaster until the 1990s.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1975_Banqiao_Dam_failure

In terms of loss of life Chernobyl disaster is comparable to Bhopal disaster (at least 3,787 over 16,000 claimed deaths), caused by Methyl isocyanate leak from the storage tank. A combination of poorly-maintained or non-functional facilities, a disregard of safety standards, and an under-trained workforce made it possible for water to leak into the MIC tanks in the absence of properly working safety systems.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhopal_disaster

Chernobyl disaster was caused by a combination of reactor design error and operator error. After this errors have been fixed (different nuclear fuel composition, modern monitoring and controlling equipment, improved operator training and procedures) there are still 7 operational RBMK in Russia. (The same reactor type as Chernobyl)