Finland investigate Google over destruction of 250k trees

https://yle.fi/a/74-20254086

42•DeepLogin•39m ago

Comments

ChrisArchitect•30m ago

Discussion on previous developments:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50194283

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50048638

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49968324

ActionHank•25m ago

Nothing will happen, calling it now.

akudha•22m ago

What is the point? They will pay a fine and move on to their next exploit. Maybe the punishment should be to force them to spend as much money/time/effort as needed to regrow the entire forest, all 250,000 trees, and then some. Even if it takes 20-30 years - pay for reforestation, hire crews, pay for inspections/watchdogs to monitor etc

dcrazy•21m ago

If Finland prohibits them from continuing construction, they don’t get the data center they want, and they have to start over somewhere else.

outside1234•18m ago

This. This would be real pain for them in terms of latency to launch.

akudha•18m ago

Yes, Finland can also tighten the rules on future permits etc. But after all this, Google will simply pay a fine and look for another country/forest to exploit. It will also not bring back the 250K trees they destroyed.

JensenTorp•16m ago

The trees were being "destroyed" (harvested) anyway, that is why they were planted. I don't understand why certain types of people are struggling so hard with the facts of this case.

dcrazy•7m ago

Even if Google abandons the site and refuses to pay a fine, they’ll have lost all the money they have invested in site surveys, contracts, labor… even the delays alone of making them fulfill the EIS cost them money, not to mention whatever opportunity cost they were trying to minimize by flouting the environmental regulations.

Google is already feeling pain from this.

JensenTorp•17m ago

tschellenbach•16m ago

It's a weird story. There must have been dozens of approvals by the government for this project.

throwitaway222•14m ago

That's the first thing that comes to mind here too. Very very very few contractors are going to do work without a permit. Maybe Finland needs to investigate their own government offices?

Hamuko•7m ago

Google asked the regulators if they could skip doing an environmental impact assessment. The regulators told them that they could not skip doing it. They'd already started logging before asking for the exemption and continued to log for months after being told that there would not be an exemption.

They'd also applied for a landscaping permit for the site, but were denied one by the municipality because they'd still not performed the environmental impact assessment.

Hamuko•10m ago

The HN submission title is wrong and editorialised. Google is not being investigated for cutting trees. They're being investigated for environmental damage, including drainage and water management at the site. There's been reports of water running from the site out into the environment.

tremon•9m ago

This is what happens when you think you can skip the environmental assessment:

> “We had wolves coming into the village because all the wild animals moved out of the forest,” Anni Ranta, a resident of Otanmaki, told The Guardian. “They fled.”

https://fortune.com/2026/10/26/wolves-finland-google-1300-ac...

dosinga•8m ago

I think this is a case of a misleading headline. Do the 250K trees even enter into this:

> Police said that, based on current information, there have been irregularities and shortcomings in drainage and water management at the data centre project's worksite

250K trees sounds like a lot, but Finland has like 20B trees, so it would take 3 hours for Finland to grow this back

mig39•8m ago

Not to excuse things, but was this an industrial monoculture tree farm that they replaced with a data centre? This isn't "wild" forest, is it?

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