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- Hacker News
- Hopefully, such deals will also convince countries to build more nuclear power plants or expand existing ones. Europe urgently needs more electricity.by xvilka
- in ur backyard not mine thxby pestatije
- 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...
by rob74 - It’s crazy that Google and TikTok, which mainly produce consumer software to serve ads, have grown to the scale where they literally need to set up data centres in northern countries while getting their power from nuclear power plants.by joshdavham
- > mainly produce consumer software to serve ads
Pretty reductionist. I don't know about tiktok, but Google does a lot more than serve ads
by petcat - The power plant is about 1000 MW BTW.by gblargg
- Missed opportunity for it to be 1.21 GW. I'm sure they can add another reactor.by mgiampapa
- Only because the power company won't let them buy all of it, because their finance team wants a diversified customer baseby hadlock
Wow, these are really far north. I checked on Google Maps: They are all about as far north as Oulu. It must get incredibly cold during the winter. Wiki tells me the region is at or below freezing for about six to seven months per year! I am curious how much cheaper is cooling in these locations compared to more temperate climates in continental Europe.> Google will build new data centres in Kajaani, Muhos and Vaala- You can now melt polar ice directly with your AI prompts.by amelius
- True, but it's not exactly siberia because of the funny dynamics with gulf stream, scandic mountains and large water bodies. (That balance might be easily upset by climate change, though.) It's mostly relatively cool and the winter is long. Temperatures swing from -35 to +30 °C yearly and pretty wide part of that even in short term.
For more fun perspective, compare those latitudes to America or Asia. Finland is a weird place.
by a96 - When Google was going hard on deploying renewables they stressed "additionality".
They didn't want to just buy clean hydro that already existed, or renewables that were going to get built anyway without their money, they wanted to be sure that their investment was growing the amount of clean energy available.
I'm hoping they have some justification like this for buying existing nuclear. They appear to be claiming that it would shut if they didn't pay in advance.
A similar deal by Amazon got shot down in America because the regulators realised it was shifting costs onto other grid users.
You'd assume that Finnish regulators are better than American regulators, but I’d like to see some evidence of that.
by ZeroGravitas - 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.
by an77i - Will all these data centers really be needed in 5 or 10 years from now?
The technology, compression, etc, for models are getting better and better requiring less and less H/W and power to run the same inference power.
Perhaps our hunger for ever more powerful models will be enough to offset this, but I am not sure.
by linuxhansl - 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.
by flippingheck - 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?by ra
- 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.by vasco
- Probably yes, and if not, it can most likely be repurposedby tommica
- 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.
by shmel - 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 themby blitzar
- 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.
- 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.
by iTokio - Somehow Hetzner saw at least part of it coming in 2018
https://www.hetzner.com/pressroom/five-years-helsinki/
These low prices are cost savings that we pass directly onto our customers; they come from the reduced energy prices that we pay in Finland compared to Germany, and also come from the colder climate and lower cooling requirements
by karussell - Google (or Tuike Finland as its known)
- paid 0e company tax in 2023/2024 (2025 hasn't been published yet)
- Doesn't generate any value added taxes as it only has one customer, Google Emea in Ireland
- Employs directly 120 persons
by kakoni - > As part of the deal, Google signed a 22-year contract with Finnish utility Fortum to buy up to 50% of the output from the Loviisa nuclear power plant.
> Finland has emerged as an attractive location for data centres because of its cool climate, plentiful low-carbon electricity and relatively uncongested power grid.
by wxw - Up to 50%by jbverschoor
- Relatively uncongested…for nowby chardz
- 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.by epistasis
- This is basically due to Google probably rightly believing that electricity price in Finland is going up due to all these datacenters and also a pr stunt that the current government loves because they can claim that they aren't allowing these datacenters to raise electricity price.
This isn't investing in power infrastructure in any way, there is no reality where that nuclear plant wasn't staying in operation as long as they can possibly keep it running in the foreseeable future. Basically only way Google and Fortum will be building new nuclear capacity is by Finland promising to cover any electricity price below 15 cents per kWh in the market.
by Illotus - POV: you know nothing about how energy market works.
Not only disappointing such comments exist on HN, but to be at top is depressing.
by dzhiurgis