Earlier in October, Finnish authorities ordered Google’s affiliate data center developer Tuike Finland Oy to immediately suspend the illegal cutting of some 1,300 acres of forest. The tech giant was given a week to draft a report explaining its actions, which soon became a flashpoint for Europe’s growing outrage over the data center boom.
As the anger grew, reporters descended on the scene — and what they found is a clear-cut example of the AI revolution’s impact on the environment.
New reporting by the Guardian shed fresh light on the impacts of Google’s deforestation. After the 1,300 acres of pristine boreal forests were reduced to tracts of mud and stumps, fauna which once called the woods home has been forced to vacate.
In the felling-site near the Finnish village of Otanmäki, the ensuing loss of prey has forced packs of wolves to search for food elsewhere: nearby villages.
“We had wolves coming into the village because all the wild animals moved out of the forest,” 53-year-old Otanmäki resident Anni Ranta told the Guardian. “They fled.”
Though Ranta’s family has called the area home for generations, the tumult has her considering whether to move out of Otanmäki for good.
“I don’t want them here,” she continued, speaking of Google’s data centers. “I don’t want them in Finland at all. I don’t like the whole idea of AI and the world changing and the way it’s changing. It’s going too fast, too soon.”
Antti Jakonen, a resident of Muhos, put it in even starker terms. “It has been done in the wrong way. American style. No sense. No sense at all,” he told the Guardian.
Sure enough, back in Google’s home country, data center developers are increasingly duking it out with the natural world — and winning handily.
In West Virginia, a grove of critically endangered Chestnut trees is under threat of being bulldozed to make way for a new Anthropic hyperscale facility. Outside of Fort Wayne, a chunk of Indiana’s once-bountiful wetlands is being tilled to fit a new Google data center. In Southern New Jersey, a data center operator was recently slapped with a $1 million fine after inspectors uncovered 62 illegal gas generators belching exhaust into the surrounding environment.
Wherever in the world data centers go up, it seems the destruction of natural resources is inevitable — and increasingly difficult for humanity to ignore.
More on data centers: There Are Signs of Serious Trouble in the Data Center Industry
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