Finnish authorities have ordered Google to stop preparatory construction work at two planned artificial intelligence data centre sites, after an investigation found that hundreds of thousands of trees had been cut down before required environmental assessments were complete.
According to The Guardian, which published an investigation into the clearances on 22 October, roughly 250,000 trees were felled across about 330 hectares at the Muhos site in northern Finland. Combined with clearances at a second site in Kajaani, some outlets put the total as high as 400,000 trees across 300 to 330 hectares.
A record investment under scrutiny
The two sites are part of a €13bn investment (roughly $15bn or £11bn) that Google announced in Finland in early September 2026, which the company described as its largest single investment in Europe. The project is run through a local company, Tuike Finland Oy.
Finland’s Licensing and Supervision Authority, known by its Finnish acronym LVV, requested reports from Muhos municipality, the city of Kajaani and Tuike Finland on 18 September over permits and work already carried out. It later ordered the company to halt all work affecting the environment at both sites until environmental impact assessments are completed. Finnish police have since opened a probe into suspected illegal logging.
Workers reportedly also stripped topsoil, built access roads and altered drainage at the sites, raising concerns that muddy runoff could reach nearby waterways.
Pressure and pushback
A building inspector in Muhos told the Finnish newspaper Helsingin Sanomat that he felt pressured by Google’s lawyers into granting permission for preparatory work. A Google representative denied that the company pressured municipalities. Mikko Kari, the municipality’s technical director, said felling carried out by a private landowner was largely outside the municipality’s purview to police, calling it ‘not really the municipality’s business.’
It doesn’t end.
That was the response from Mari Annala, an ecologist with the Finnish Association for Nature Conservation, describing the scale of clearance tied to data centre expansion in the region.
Google’s Finland country head has since publicly apologised for the forest clearances. Meanwhile, a petition demanding stricter regulation of data centres in Finland has gathered more than 93,000 signatures, nearing the threshold needed to force the country’s Parliament to formally debate the issue.
Critics, including local ecologists, argue the data centre projects bring comparatively few jobs and limited tax revenue to Finland relative to the scale of land cleared and forest lost. The case adds to a broader debate across Europe over how AI infrastructure investment is weighed against environmental and planning rules, as similar tensions have surfaced around data centre growth in Ireland, the Netherlands and Sweden.
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