HELSINKI, May 20 (Reuters) - Alphabet-owned Google

will invest a further 1 billion euros ($1.1 billion)

into the expansion of its data centre campus in Finland to drive

its artificial intelligence (AI) business growth in Europe, it

said in a statement on Monday.

In recent years, many data centres have been located in the

Nordic countries because of the region's cooler climate, tax

breaks and abundant availability of renewable power.

Finland's Nordic neighbours Sweden and Norway have recently

grown increasingly critical of hosting them, with some industry

experts arguing the Nordic countries should use their renewable

power for products such as green steel that could leave higher

surplus value in the countries.

But Finland's wind power capacity has increased so rapidly

in recent years, by 75% to 5,677 megawatts in 2022 alone, that

on windy days prices have plummeted to negative, industry

statistics showed.

Therefore there is still renewable capacity available for

data centres such as Google's, which acquires wind power in

Finland under long term contracts.

Analysts believe data centres' power consumption is set to

massively increase due to the rapid growth in AI usage, which

Google, too, cited for one of the reasons behind its investment

decision, alongside its Hamina data centre in Finland already

operating with 97% carbon-free energy.

"Heat coming out of our Finnish data center will be

re-routed to the district heating network in nearby Hamina,

covering local households, schools and public service

buildings," Google said in the statement. It added that it aimed

to achieve net zero emissions across all of its operations and

value chain by 2030.

In addition to its Finnish investment, the search and cloud

giant announced last month it would build new data centres in

the Netherlands and Belgium.

($1 = 0.9225 euros)