Google buys half of a Finnish reactor site for 22 years

Without it, the plant was facing shutdown. Fortum wrote in the disclosure that Loviisa could not continue operating beyond 2030 without the lifetime extension investment program. The plant supplies 10% of all electricity in Finland and employs about 580 Fortum staff, which means one data center company's purchase commitment decided whether a tenth of a country's power would keep running.

Look at the hardware and you can see how little time was left. Loviisa is two pressurized water reactors that came online in 1977 and 1980, each rated at 507 MWe. Together they produce roughly 8 terawatt-hours a year, and their original design lifetimes ran only to the end of 2027 and the end of 2030. The plant sits about 100 kilometers from Helsinki and about 55 kilometers from the Hamina data center that Google built out of a converted paper mill in 2011.

The contract takes effect a little later than the signature. Deliveries start in 2028 at a smaller volume and reach 50% of capacity from 2030 through 2049. Fortum said the agreement gives it the revenue certainty to carry through the full investment required for the extension, and that on top of an already planned 38 MW uprate due online in 2028, a further 10 MW power increase has now become possible.

Signing and spending, however, are not yet the same thing. Fortum's Loviisa investment program runs to roughly EUR 1 billion between 2023 and 2050, and about 80% of the projects and EUR 700 million of the capital expenditure needed to keep the plant running to 2050 are still awaiting investment decisions. The company says individual investment decisions will be taken separately. The 22-year contract is signed; most of the decisions that actually release money are not.

What Fortum gets is written down in numbers. The company expects its group comparable return on net assets to rise by about 1.4 percentage points once 50% of the plant's generation capacity is contracted. The long-term target set in late autumn 2025 is 14%, and the figure for the twelve months to the end of the second quarter of 2026 was 11.0%. Fortum's President and CEO Markus Rauramo said that "our agreement with Google meets Fortum's long-term return requirements and clearly improves the risk-adjusted return profile of existing nuclear assets."

Google's stated reason is the grid. Aris Karcanias, Director of Energy for EMEA at Google, said that "by supporting the lifetime extension of the Loviisa plant, we're doing our part to keep a critical energy source on the grid." The same day, Google announced that it will invest EUR 13 billion in Finland across 2027 and 2028, and Bikash Koley, Vice President of Google Global Infrastructure, wrote that this is the largest single investment the company has made in Europe.

Other instruments sit alongside the power contract. Google has contracted a 94 MW battery system next to its Kajaani data center, with Fortum optimizing its operation. It is supporting two onshore wind projects, bringing the new-to-the-grid onshore wind it has contracted in Finland to 629 MW. The two companies also signed a memorandum of understanding to explore new nuclear capacity, renewables and flexibility together, and Fortum holds a Nordic renewables pipeline of 8 GW in permitting.

Google argues that where a data center goes changes grid costs as much as where a power plant goes. A study the company commissioned found that placing 1 GW of new demand in the Oulu and Kajaani region instead of the south could save electricity consumers roughly EUR 520 million over twenty years, and Google noted in a footnote that the 1 GW figure is an illustrative assumption. During construction in 2027 and 2028 the company estimates it will support 37,000 jobs nationwide and add EUR 3.6 billion a year to Finnish GDP, and it is putting EUR 31 million into four municipalities over four years to fund AI upskilling for more than 4,400 workers.

Read the contract the way a lawyer would and what actually changed hands here is not electricity but risk. The largest risk in extending a reactor's life is that nobody knows what wholesale power will cost in twenty years, and a fixed buyer for 22 years moves that risk from the generator to the purchaser. Fortum explained that the agreement differs economically from its customary financial hedging, reflecting long-term customer value rather than short-term market pricing, while also saying it will be counted in the group's long-term hedge ratio.

On the other side of that transferred risk sit electricity consumers. The survival of an asset carrying a tenth of a country's power was settled by a long-term commercial contract rather than a regulatory process, and Finnish households and businesses will meet the consequences in their bills. That is the position Google was writing against when it repeated that it would add carbon-free supply to the grid so that its own demand does not raise power prices. Rauramo also said that "long-term partnerships like the one between Fortum and Google are essential, especially in today's uncertain market environment characterized by low visibility and highly volatile electricity prices."

The disclosure METAL read goes as far as saying the two companies will look together at business models for building new reactors at Loviisa. METAL has covered the analysis that big tech's data center power procurement could be caught out by natural gas price forecasts in last month's piece on data center electricity supply, and this contract is the answer that solves the same problem with 22 years of nuclear instead.

How much electricity AI data centers consume is now the second question. The first is whose plant that demand keeps alive, for how many more years, and who pays for it. Loviisa's next two decades rest not on a Finnish energy policy document but on one search company's purchase commitment.