Microsoft reportedly views the Nordic region as a prime place for emission-free capacity to support artificial intelligence. It is changing its data center strategy to be driven by power availability rather than user demand or increasing supply.

Microsoft wants to become carbon negative by 2030, which means it must find emission-free renewable power to support the AI-driven growth of its cloud-based data storage and usage. Microsoft currently operates about 300 data centers worldwide and plans to invest an additional $80 billion by the end of June.

According to Alistair Speirs, senior director for Datacenter & AI Infrastructure at Microsoft, the global adoption of AI is generating new workloads that are not legally restricted to a particular area, enabling Microsoft to construct data centers in areas like the Nordics, where there is a plentiful supply of emission-free electricity.

"There'll be locations across the world, but efficient energy infrastructure is going to be the deciding factor for a lot of these areas," according to reports.

Microsoft has teamed with local district heating companies, including utility Fortum, to redistribute the waste heat from the data centers to heat households as part of its ongoing development of a dozen new data centers in three locations in Finland.

"As we look at the Nordic region, Finland in particular, it has huge advantages to grow this sort of infrastructure," Alistair says.

According Alistair, Microsoft's data centre expansion strategy was first based on demand, then it moved to supply where it expected demand to increase, and finally it adopted what it now refers to as its "power first" approach, which places an emphasis on an inexpensive, emission-free power supply as a key driver of investment.

The partnership will enable Fortum, which will gather waste heat on two new Microsoft data centre locations in the Helsinki area, to reduce emissions even more in the direction of its objective of becoming carbon neutral in its district heating—that is, heat that is supplied and distributed from a central source—business in Finland by 2029.