Google project in Finland halted after 250,000 trees were cut for AI data centers before environmental review
Regulators said Google cleared about 250,000 trees without required environmental reviews and warned of fines if the company does not comply.
- On Thursday, Licensing and Supervision Authority regulators referred Google's Muhos project to police for investigation after discovering roughly five miles of drainage ditches were dug without required advance notification.
- Earlier this month, regulators halted construction at Muhos and Otanmäki after Google cleared 400,000 trees across 330 hectares without completing mandatory environmental impact assessments.
- Ecologist Mari Annala from the Finnish Association for Nature Conservation described ongoing impacts as relentless, while residents protested brown water from the construction site entering the Oulujoki River.
- Google's Finland country manager, Antti Järvinen, apologized for the tree felling, stating the company acted on its "best understanding we had of the legislation at the time" while awaiting the LVV verdict.
- Google faces broader scrutiny from Donald Trump, who urged the company to reconsider its international investments in favor of building artificial intelligence infrastructure within the United States.
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90 Articles
During the expansion of its first data centre in the Nordic country.
The debate surrounding the construction of dozens of data centers in Finland has flared up again due to large-scale illegal logging ordered by Google....
Around 250,000 trees were felled for a planned Google data center in Finland – without a final environmental impact assessment. Nature conservationists criticise possible damage to forests and waters.
According to a state agency, it did so without the necessary permissions: now the works are stopped
Finnish licensing authorities have temporarily halted the construction of two Google data centers. The tech giant cleared a total of 530 hectares without permission, accounting for hundreds of thousands of trees. Google admits the facts but says it acted in good faith.
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