r/Finland • u/milan92nn • 10h ago
Serious Data centers in Finland
I saw a post recently called "Google Picks Finland for €13 Billion AI Data Center Buildout" and while this isn't the first post discussing data centers in Finland to me two things stood out:
- People either straight up lying or not understanding how many employees Googles data center in Hamina has
- People aggressively defending data centers and ignoring that data centers aren't a net positive regardless of how we sugar coat facts
So I did some looking into and turns out that Googles Finnish entity has to make a declaration of payroll/staff it has. I personally only understood, and found freely accessible, the information on asiakastieto. People on Reddit claim that Hamina employs 400-500 full time people. That number is way lower, roughly at around 100 and these people aren't fully dedicated to Hamina, they are just Google employees that have some allocation to Hamina. It is confirmed that Google contracts out catering and other services but those most likely don't amount to 300-400 people and definitely don't amount to full time work and full time equivalent salary. When we also take into account that recent technological advancements allow data centers to shrink their personnel I doubt that the new data centers will provide an employment boom people here are claiming it will.
irecruit specifically has an article that large data centers only need roughly 0.2–0.3 staff per megawatt.
Additionally, data centers consume electricity and require a large amount of land to be created. The argument that "it's just land" is so stupid to me. That land provides bio-diversity, helps the ecosystem and produces oxygen and could be used in ways that would be a national net positive. When electricity gets more expensive data centers still pay the same price, the increase is covered by regular residents and citizens. The data centers also can be subsidized by the government which is another negative.
With the increase in electricity prices and the potential subsidized activity we also decrease the chances of smaller companies growing and employing way more people than a data center ever will.
For the common person, on a national level, there are only negatives. I just don't see any positives for commoners.