Data Centres Can Be Finland's Ace in International Politics

A leaked February 2026 US State Department cable revealed that Washington had instructed its diplomats to lobby against other states’ data sovereignty initiatives and called the EU’s data protection regulation unnecessarily burdensome. The episode shows how digital infrastructure has become a geopolitical battleground, and how hard it is for small countries like Finland to resist pressure from superpowers. Data centres can help here, provided we build them on our own terms.

In spring 2026, a case was reported in which a US tech giant shared emails from Dutch authorities with the US House of Representatives. Those authorities were responsible for overseeing the EU’s Digital Services Act, which requires large digital platforms to be transparent about content moderation and risk management. If Finland and the EU fail to act decisively, we will lose our ability to influence.

Why are data centres foreign policy?

Digital services require physical components, and those components sit in data centres. Unlike a traditional industrial product, a service can be used and produced anywhere, but physical location determines whose rules it operates under. Data centres are not merely servers. They generate artificial intelligence, cloud services, and critical digital services ranging from banking to healthcare. They form part of today’s core infrastructure, and therefore also part of our bargaining power. It has always been in Finland’s interest to be part of the West’s critical operations, be it copper, mobile phones, or icebreakers. Now it means data centres.

Data centres are not merely investments. They are foreign policy, and that is why they should not be built on just any terms. We must demand that they also serve Finland’s interests.

On whose terms should data centres be built?

Data centres should be held to the same ecological sustainability standards as any other industry. Valuable natural sites must be protected, harms minimised and compensated, and low emissions pursued. Finland’s clean electricity, cold climate, and the link between waste heat and district heating make data centres more sustainable here than elsewhere. The upcoming data centre in my home municipality, Kirkkonummi, is a good example, though such efficient waste-heat recovery is not yet the rule everywhere. Once complete, it is designed to produce waste heat covering roughly 40 per cent of district heating demand in Kirkkonummi, Espoo, and Kauniainen, replacing natural gas used there during peak demand.

What matters most for nature is permitting, zoning, and the pricing of harms. Emissions trading and spot electricity pricing already create strong incentives for energy efficiency, but wider use of waste heat depends more on zoning and permitting than on market signals. Suomen luonnonsuojeluliitto (the Finnish Association for Nature Conservation) has likewise argued against a new subsidy scheme for data centres and for factoring waste-heat use into siting decisions from the start, both consistent with a market-based approach.

Data centres can strengthen Finland’s international standing, but only if we use our position as host state intelligently. Electricity and permitting are our leverage, but without sufficient European ownership and data sovereignty, that leverage remains incomplete. The United States pressures other countries on digital sovereignty because a host country’s decisions affect its own companies’ operations. The Dutch authorities’ emails, however, are a reminder that physical location alone is not enough protection. Those emails sat on European servers, and they still ended up with the US House of Representatives. Genuine independence for European services therefore also requires capacity that is under European ownership and not subject to the control of foreign powers.

What does Finland gain from data centres?

A whole ecosystem also needs to grow up around data centres, as a network of phone-industry suppliers once did around Nokia. Grid infrastructure, industrial construction, and hardware, for instance, all offer considerable opportunity to capture added value in Finland. Finnish companies are already developing world-class cooling and power-distribution solutions. On that base, Finland can build high-level software and research work to compete in global markets. A significant share of the value then stays here, as wages, tax revenue, jobs, and know-how capital.

As a software developer, I have seen how dependence on foreign platforms builds up gradually. One feature, one interface, one service at a time. The same pattern is likely with data centres, except over decades, and unwinding it is a far bigger undertaking. That is why it is not a matter of indifference where these centres get built.

In Oulu, for example, an AI-ready data centre campus is planned, built by the Nordic cloud firm Glesys and Finnish real estate investor Trevian. The first phase is due in autumn 2026, capacity can be expanded many times over, and the premises are former Nokia facilities. Nordic-owned scaling options do exist. In Germany’s Schleswig-Holstein, for instance, moving away from Microsoft software saves around €15 million a year in licence fees, after a one-off investment of around €9 million. Reducing dependence on a single supplier can also be economically sound.

Is there enough electricity for data centres in Finland?

Critics’ concern about electricity prices is not entirely without merit. As individual electricity consumers, data centres are fairly large, and typically hedge against price swings with long-term, fixed-price contracts. Finland has, however, already permitted plenty of renewable electricity that is simply waiting for a long-term customer. The real bottleneck is the transmission grid, whose reinforcement is slow and falls to the public sector, plus supply adequacy during weeks of still, freezing weather.

Even then, more options exist than is often suggested: storing electricity as hydrogen, batteries, demand response, transmission links to Sweden and Norway, enabling wind power in eastern Finland, and data centres’ own power plants and their ability to adjust consumption to price. Overall, there is enough electricity, and the decisive question is whether sufficient flexibility is built in time. Even though a recent study found demand response and data centres’ own load management still only at the planning stage in many parts of Finland, I believe an undistorted price signal and a reinforced transmission grid will bring that flexibility forward in time.

Why is this being decided now?

What is being built now is the international infrastructure of coming decades. Bound up in it is not only environmental sustainability, but the bargaining power of the nation that hosts it. Physical hardware is, moreover, a concrete demonstration that Finland is worth investing in. Finland’s stability is also in the interest of the owning company and its home state, once a valuable investment sits here. The more that is genuinely valuable here to foreign owners, the more parties have reason to support Finland’s security and stability.

Either way, data centres will probably be built somewhere. Finland should use data centres as a strategic tool, but only if they are built on our terms.