Google signs 22-year nuclear power deal with Finland's Fortum, commits €13 billion to AI data centers

Google announced Wednesday a €13 billion investment in Finnish data-center infrastructure through 2028, paired with a 22-year agreement to buy power from a Finnish nuclear plant that Fortum, the state-controlled utility, says would otherwise struggle to keep operating past 2030. The deal is Google's first nuclear-energy agreement outside the United States and its largest single investment in Europe to date.

Under the power-purchase agreement, Google will begin buying electricity from Fortum's Loviisa nuclear plant in 2028 at a reduced volume, ramping up to as much as half of the plant's output between 2030 and 2049. Loviisa's two Soviet-designed VVER-440 reactors, commissioned in 1977 and 1981, supply roughly a tenth of Finland's electricity and employ about 580 people. Finland's government and nuclear regulator STUK had already approved extending the plant's operating licenses to the end of 2050, but Fortum needed the revenue certainty of a long-term buyer to justify the roughly €1 billion in capital upgrades the extension requires.

Why a tech company is buying into a 1970s reactor

"By supporting the extension of the Loviisa power plant's lifespan, we are doing our part to preserve a critical energy source," said Aris Karcanias, Google's EMEA head of data-center energy and infrastructure. Fortum chief executive Markus Rauramo said long-term partnerships of this kind "bring the predictability required for investments in new, low-carbon electricity generation capacity." Alongside the nuclear deal, Google's announcement included new onshore wind contracts with developers Valorem and Suomen Hyötytuuli covering 629 megawatts of capacity, and a 94-megawatt battery storage project near Kajaani due to begin operating in late 2027. The companies also signed a memorandum of understanding to study whether new nuclear generation could be built at the Loviisa site altogether, though no firm commitment has been made.

The euro figure funds new or expanded data-center sites at Hamina, Kajaani, Muhos and Vaala. Google estimates the construction phase will support more than 37,000 jobs nationally and contribute an average of €3.6 billion a year to Finnish gross domestic product, with roughly 7,000 permanent jobs once the facilities are running.

"This investment underscores Google's commitment to grow our presence responsibly, pairing the expansion of our technical infrastructure with new energy capacity, grid enhancements, and energy affordability initiatives," said Ruth Porat, Alphabet's president and chief investment officer.

Finland's data-center boom has a downside

Finland has become one of Europe's fastest-growing hosts for hyperscale computing, drawn by its cold climate, cheap Nordic wholesale electricity and political stability; Fortum already supplies data centers run by Microsoft, which struck a waste-heat recycling deal with the utility in 2022, along with newer entrants Nscale and DayOne. But the buildout has generated domestic friction. Finland's grid operator, Fingrid, has estimated that data-center-driven demand could push national electricity consumption up by nearly 40% over five years, and the government raised the tax rate on data-center electricity use effective July 1 amid political debate over whether ordinary consumers would end up subsidizing the industry's growth through higher prices.

Google has operated a data center in Hamina, on Finland's southern coast, since 2011, built inside a converted paper mill; Wednesday's investment expands that site and adds three inland locations at Kajaani, Muhos and Vaala, spreading the buildout beyond the coastal region that has attracted most of the country's prior hyperscale investment. Fortum's newsroom has for years pointed to its data-center partnerships as evidence its power generation can underwrite Finland's broader industrial strategy; the utility's 2022 waste-heat arrangement with Microsoft, which channels excess heat from that company's data centers into district heating for homes near Espoo, is the template officials now cite when describing what they hope the Google relationship will eventually look like at scale.

Markets reacted quickly to the announcement: Fortum's Helsinki-listed shares jumped roughly 10% intraday, and the company said the fully contracted Loviisa arrangement would eventually add about 1.4 percentage points to its group return on net assets. Not every analyst was won over — Seeking Alpha maintained only a "Hold" rating on Fortum stock even after the jump, citing the deal's long timeline and remaining execution risk in the roughly €700 million of upgrade spending still to be committed.

The deal extends a pattern that began in the United States, where Google, Microsoft and Amazon have all signed agreements over the past two years to secure nuclear power — including small modular reactor projects and life-extension deals for existing plants — as a way to lock in large volumes of steady, carbon-free electricity for AI data centers that need to run continuously. Wednesday's announcement marks the first time Google has struck that kind of arrangement outside the U.S., and the first involving one of Europe's aging Soviet-era reactor fleets rather than a newer commercial design. Industry analysts have argued that fintechs and technology companies securing their own long-term power contracts, rather than relying on wholesale markets, could reshape how utilities finance the life extensions of older nuclear plants across Europe more broadly.

What happens next

The agreement now moves into an implementation phase that will stretch across two decades: Fortum's capital program at Loviisa proceeds under the new revenue backstop, Google's Finnish construction runs through 2028, and the memorandum of understanding on potential new reactor capacity heads into a feasibility study with no firm timeline attached. The deal is likely to be watched closely by other hyperscalers weighing whether to follow Google, Microsoft and Amazon's American subsidiaries in tying long-term power contracts to nuclear plants as AI computing demand strains electricity grids on both sides of the Atlantic — and by Finnish policymakers still working out how to balance that investment against its cost to ordinary ratepayers.