HELSINKI, March 7 (Reuters) - Microsoft ( MSFT ) is

shifting its data centre strategy to be driven by power

availability rather than user demand or creating supply, and

sees the Nordic region as a prime location for emission-free

capacity to sustain artificial intelligence, its director in

charge of AI Infrastructure said on Friday.

Microsoft ( MSFT ), which operates some 300 data centres globally and

is investing about $80 billion more in them by the end of June,

has a goal to become carbon negative by 2030, meaning it needs

to find emission-free renewable power to be able to sustain the

AI-driven expansion of its cloud-based data storage and usage.

Alistair Speirs, Microsoft's ( MSFT ) senior director for Datacentre

& AI Infrastructure, said the global expansion in the use of

artificial intelligence was creating new workloads that are not

tied to a specific location by legislation, allowing Microsoft ( MSFT )

to build data centres where abundant emission-free power is

available, such as the Nordic region.

"There'll be locations across the world but efficient energy

infrastructure is going to be the deciding factor for a lot of

these areas," he told Reuters on a visit to Finland.

Microsoft ( MSFT ) is currently developing a dozen new data centres

on three sites in Finland and has partnered with local district

heating producers, such as utility Fortum, that will

redistribute the waste heat from the data centres to heat homes.

"As we look at the Nordic region, Finland in particular, it

has huge advantages to grow this sort of infrastructure," Speirs

said, referring to the region's cold climate that helps cool

data centres, reliable power grids and abundant availability of

carbon-neutral power among other factors.

Microsoft's ( MSFT ) strategy for its data centre expansion was

initially driven by where demand was, then shifted to creating

supply where it anticipated more demand, before taking on what

the company now calls its "power first" approach, in which

affordable and emission-free power supply is a decisive factor

driving investment, he said.

Fortum, which will collect waste heat on two new Microsoft ( MSFT )

data centre sites in the Helsinki region, said the collaboration

would allow it to cut emissions further towards its goal of

reaching carbon neutrality in its district heating - or heat

supplied and distributed from a central source - business in

Finland by 2029.