The real issue seems thay they didnt implement proper water mitigation which is about 100x more damaging and potentially hazardous than cutting down trees. You can see it in the photo, they arent building that complex with much concern for the surrounding environment.
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.
A viscous cycle all around!
> “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...
> 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
That's not how math.....or trees.....work.
https://www.finder.fi/IT-konsultointi+IT-palvelut/Tuike+Finl...
Notably, this is the address of Google Hamina Campus.
Google is already feeling pain from this.
Maybe the delay and opportunity cost caused them some pain, but whatever they invested in contracts, labor etc is probably pocket change for them
The details are much less dramatic: The company doing the work messed up on a part of the approval process that was supposed to be completed first. It’s technically possible that the environmental impact review would come back with some obscure exception that required them to revise their plans, but it’s unlikely that anything was going to stop those trees from being cut down.
The 250K trees headline appears dramatic if you don’t know that Finland is covered in trees and cutting down a lot of them is part of building anything.
The tricky part with "no permit needed" is that while you can just go and do whatever, if someone charged with enforcement suspects you're doing something that requires a permit, they can still demand you prove you don't (and stop work until you do), and if you guessed wrong and you did indeed need a permit, you're double-fucked.
That's why for many of these processes, there's also something like a certificate of no-permit needed, where you go through an abbreviated permitting process spending a lot of time and money while all of the clerks and officials stare at you like you're a moron before finally giving you a piece of paper saying you didn't need to do any of that in the first place.
And that's why a lot of people with a lot of experience and a good understanding of the law skip getting a "no permit needed" certificate.
I am assuming it's similar in other countries.
Turns out, if the trees lost are about 2000kg, it takes about ~ 2.5 days.
Growing stock volume: ~2.66B m^3
Annual volume increment: 103M m^3
Approximate average tree volume: ~0.125-0.13 m^3
Volume of 250K trees: 250k x 0.1275 ~ 32k m^3
Time for remaining trees to grow that volume back: 32k / 103M m^3/year ~ 0.00031 years ~ 2.7 to 4.3 hours
ChrisArchitect•49m ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50194283
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50048638
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49968324