Powering the Future: How Cold Nordic Countries Are Building the World's AI Backbone

Summary

Imagine you want to build the world's smartest computer. This computer needs to be on twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. It needs a lot of electricity—more than a small city. It also gets very hot and needs a lot of cooling. And it needs this electricity and cooling to be cheap, clean, and reliable.

Where do you build this computer?

Most people would think of California or Texas, where there are many technology companies. But smart companies are building these computers in a surprising place: the Nordic countries.

Finland, Sweden, Norway, and Denmark. These cold countries with long winters and lots of wind and water power are becoming the best place in the world to build AI data centers.

Why? Because they have three big advantages: lots of clean renewable energy, very cold air for free cooling, and smart planning to make sure their electricity grids can handle the extra demand. Let me explain how this works with some examples.

(1) Renewable energy

Norway gets almost all its electricity from hydroelectric dams. That is water power from rivers and waterfalls. Sweden has hydroelectric power and nuclear power.

Finland has nuclear power, hydroelectric power, and wind power.

Denmark has a lot of wind turbines. All these sources make clean electricity without carbon emissions. And they make a lot of it.

The Nordic countries together produce much more electricity than they need for their own people. They can sell the extra to data centers.

(2) The cold climate

Data centers get very hot because all those computers are working hard. Normally, you need big air conditioning machines to cool them.

Air conditioning uses a lot of electricity. But in the Nordic countries, it is so cold in winter that you do not need air conditioning at all. The cold outside air cools the computers for free. This is called "free cooling." It saves a lot of money and electricity.

(3) The electricity grid

The electricity wires and power stations that bring power to homes and businesses. In many countries, these grids are old and cannot handle a sudden increase in demand from data centers. But the Nordic countries are upgrading their grids and making smart plans to handle the extra demand from AI.

Let us give you some examples of what is happening

In Finland, a company called Nebius is expanding its data center in a place called Mäntsälä.

They are tripling the size to 75 megawatts. That is enough power for 50,000 homes. They use a special cooling system called direct liquid cooling.

Liquid cooling is like having water pipes inside the computers to take away the heat.

It is much more efficient than air cooling. Their data center has a PUE of 1.1. PUE stands for Power Usage Effectiveness. It measures how efficiently a data center uses electricity. 1.1 is incredibly good. Most data centers are 1.5 or higher.

Even better, Nebius recovers the waste heat from the computers and uses it to heat nearby homes. They recover 20,000 megawatt-hours of heat every