Google set out to build €13 billion worth of data centers in Finland — its largest single investment in Europe. Now two of those sites are on hold. Finland's Licensing and Supervision Agency, known as LVV, ordered Google subsidiary Tuike Finland to stop work after builders cleared roughly 300 hectares of forest at the Leppiniemi plot in Muhos before an environmental impact assessment was finished.
Finnish law requires large industrial projects to complete an EIA before breaking ground — logging, blasting, drainage and road-building are all off-limits until that review wraps up. Google and its contractors started preparing the Muhos and Kajaani sites before the assessments for those two campuses were done. Two other planned sites, in Vaala and the already-operating Hamina facility, aren't affected by the order.
The agency gave Google until October 14th to explain what happened, with a hard deadline of October 23rd to stop all work completely. Miss that, and the company risks a conditional fine. The banned activities go beyond tree-cutting: excavation, blasting, drainage and construction of roads or storage buildings are all paused too.
Google has acknowledged the breach. A company spokesperson said it "did not meet the high standards we set for ourselves" in this case, and promised to replant 130 hectares of forest in Muhos. For scale, 300 cleared hectares works out to roughly 400 football pitches — meaning the replanting pledge covers less than half of what's already gone.
The episode points to a less obvious bottleneck in the AI buildout: not chips or power, but environmental permitting that big tech sometimes tries to outrun. For the EU, already locked in antitrust fights with Google, it's one more reason to scrutinize data center expansion more closely.
