• Google’s subsidiary Tuike Finland cleared and drained 330 hectares of forest at Muhos for a data center site
• The company failed to get the necessary environmental impact assessments completed before carrying out the felling
• A preliminary police investigation is now taking place, based on ‘ambiguities and ‌shortcomings in the drainage and water management’, although the results of this won’t be known until 2027

A preliminary police investigation is now underway into Google’s clearing of a forest in Finland to make space for an AI data center.

As The Guardian reports, the allegation is that Google’s subsidiary Tuike Finland cleared and drained 330 hectares of forest at the site in Muhos before it had ensured the necessary environmental impact assessments were completed.

Yle (Finland’s public broadcasting company) further reports that the police have said that the investigation is into suspected environmental damage, but the other possible charges could be added depending on its ongoing findings.

Finnish police said: “Based on preliminary information, there have been ambiguities and ‌shortcomings in the drainage and water management at the construction site of Tuike Finland ​Oy’s datacentre project.”

The investigation will be far from a short process, though, and won’t be completed until some point in 2027.

Construction work was stopped on the data center in Muhos, and also at a second data center site at Kajaani-Otanmäki, on October 14. In both cases, the environmental assessments were apparently incomplete.

Antti Järvinen, who heads up Google Finland as country manager, apologized for the forest clearances, but said that Google had acted according to the “best understanding we had of the legislation at the time.”

Analysis: the rush for AI data centers

Some 400,000 trees have reportedly been felled across both sites (250,000 of those at Muhos). As The Guardian makes clear in a separate report from last week (via Tom’s Hardware), there are a lot of very unhappy Finnish people, as you might imagine.

Many of them question the building of data centers at all, and the AI gold rush that’s the driving force behind this activity. There’s apparently little direct benefit for the people of the country where these projects are underway, with only a small number of local jobs created. As a professor of computer science at the University of Helsinki, Jussi Kangasharju points out, “Really, for Finland, there are no benefits. They are international companies serving international customers. Datacentres ultimately have little benefit for others except the datacentre operator.”

Others obviously worry about the impact on wildlife. Finnish conservationists inform us that the three-toed woodpeckers in the forest have been displaced, and The Guardian highlighted that in Otanmäki, wolves that had nowhere to go when the trees were felled ended up coming into a local village.

It will be some time before the criminal investigation is completed, as noted, but you can bet that the results are going to be closely watched.