Google is paying to keep a Finnish reactor running for 22 years to power four data centres

Google committed 13 billion euros across four Finnish sites for 2027 and 2028. To power them it is contracting 629 megawatts of new-to-grid onshore wind, against a Finnish grid where the Loviisa reactor alone supplies a tenth of national electricity, plus a 94 megawatt battery system due near Kajaani in late 2027.

The line that matters is not the wind. It is a 22-year power purchase agreement with Fortum tied to a life extension of that same Loviisa plant. A hyperscaler underwriting the continued operation of an existing reactor is a materially different act from signing new-build renewables, and it is the only item in this release that changes the grid rather than adding to it.

Two more details sit below the headline. Hamina’s seawater cooling is designed to cover 80 per cent of the local district heating network’s annual heat needs, which makes the waste heat a contracted municipal input rather than a disposal problem. And the durable employment figure is 7,000 annual operational jobs against 37,000 construction-phase jobs, a fifth of the number that leads the release.

The release states generation capacity and never states data-centre IT load, so the megawatt figures describe what is being bought and not what will be served.