Nordics' efficient energy infrastructure ideal for Microsoft's data centre expansion

By Anne Kauranen

HELSINKI (Reuters) - Microsoft 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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.

(Reporting by Anne Kauranen; Editing by Susan Fenton)