The effective energy infrastructure in Nordics is perfect for expanding the Microsoft Data Center

Written by Ann Coranin

Helsinki (Reuters) – Its director in AI said on Friday that Microsoft is converting its strategy in the data center to be driven by the availability of energy instead of the user’s request or creation of the offer, and believes that the north in the north is a major location for emissions -free capacity to maintain artificial intelligence.

Microsoft, which runs about 300 databases worldwide and invests about $ 80 billion in it by the end of June, has a goal to become a carbon negative by 2030, which means that it needs to find renewable energy free of emissions to be able to maintain AI’s expansion to store and use data based on the cloud.

Alestir Spers, the main Microsoft managers of the Datacentre & Ai infrastructure, said the global expansion of the use of artificial intelligence was creating new work burdens unrelated to a specific location according to legislation, allowing Microsoft to build data centers where a removal free force is available, such as the solar region.

“There will be sites around the world, but the effective energy infrastructure will be the decisive factor of many of these areas,” told Reuters on a visit to Finland.

Microsoft is currently developing dozens of new data centers in three locations in Finland, and has been partnership with local heating producers, such as Forty Fortome, that would redistribute waste heat from databases to homes.

“While we look at the North, in Finland in particular, it has huge advantages to develop this type of infrastructure,” Spirors said, referring to the cold climate in the region that helps data centers, reliability and abundant availability of neutral carbon power among other factors.

He said that the Microsoft strategy to expand its data center was initially driven by the existence of the request, then it turned into the creation of the supply as it expected more demand, before the company now calls its “first” approach, where the reasonable energy source of cost is a decisive factor in the investment it pays.

Fortome, which will collect waste heat on two new sites for the Microsoft Center in Helsinki, said that the cooperation will allow it to reduce emissions towards its goal of reaching carbon neutrality in heating in the regions – or the heat provided and distributed from a central source – works in Finland by 2029.

(I participated in the reports of Ann Koranin; edited by Susan Venton)