Texas of Europe (Finland nickname)

Entry in progress—BP401
 
Wikipedia: Finland
Finland, officially the Republic of Finland, is a Nordic country in Northern Europe. It borders Sweden to the northwest, Norway to the north, and Russia to the east, with the Gulf of Bothnia to the west and the Gulf of Finland to the south, opposite Estonia. Its capital and largest city is Helsinki. Finland has a population of 5.7 million.[1] The official languages are Finnish and Swedish, the mother tongues of 83.5 percent and 5.0 percent of the population, respectively. Finland’s climate varies from humid continental in the south to boreal in the north. Its land is predominantly covered by boreal forest, with over 180,000 recorded lakes.
 
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Browning Machine
@BrowningMachine
@TheFinnishEagle
Welcome, Finn!
I visited Finland in 2009.
Great people. Great place.
The Texas of Europe.
7:57 PM · Jun 7, 2018
 
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Andrew
@atllam
Finland is spiritually Texan. It’s the Texas of Europe
12:50 PM · Oct 17, 2025
 
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CNBC
@CNBC
Google said it will invest 13 billion euros ($15.1 billion) into AI infrastructure in Finland — a country dubbed the “Texas of Europe.”
It marks the tech giant’s largest single investment in the region.
Read more here: https://cnb.cx/4dm214X
5:46 AM · Sep 9, 2026
 
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Mari Luukkainen
@mariluukkainen
CNBC put “Texas of Europe” in the headline on Google’s €13B data center investment in Finland and the comparison is more useful than it sounds if you look at how each place got here.
 
Texas became the data center capital of the US because the infrastructure was already there for something else. A century of oil and gas left behind pipelines, substations, transmission corridors and a culture of building large industrial things quickly. When AI compute needed gigawatts, Texas had the plumbing. ERCOT now has about 474 gigawatts of large-load requests in its queue, roughly 90 percent of them data centers, which is five times the state’s record peak demand. That number is kinda absurd and also tells you how fast a region can move once the physical groundwork exists.
 
Finland has the same thing with paper instead of oil. Hamina’s Google site is the old Stora Enso Summa mill and Kajaani, one of the four new locations, had a UPM mill until 2008. Paper mills needed what data centers need: heavy grid connections, cooling water, large flat industrial land, rail access and a municipality that knows how to deal with a single big industrial employer.
 
When the paper industry contracted, all of that infra stayed. Google bought the Hamina mill in 2009, hooked the servers up to the same seawater the mill used, and now sends the waste heat into the district heating network, covering most of the town’s annual heat demand. Texas cannot do that because nobody in Houston needs district heating in July.
 
The scale gap is interesting. Finland’s live data center capacity is 285 megawatts with 1.5 gigawatts projected for 2030. Texas adds that much to its interconnection queue in a slow month. So the nickname is less a description and more a forecast. Texas built its boom on what oil left behind and Finland is building its boom on what paper left behind - the second one comes with nuclear power, minus twenty in January, and a town that gets its heating from a search engine.
 
Btw if Google needs a fifth site, Äänekoski has a Metsä bioproduct mill that generates more electricity than it consumes, two lakes for cooling, a rail line and a housing market that has not noticed any of this. I own some properly there with very much nuked valuation. Available for a reasonable multiple of course.
5:27 PM · Sep 9, 2026
 
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Thomas Wingenfeld
@erloesung
“Finland the Texas of Europe* is best country marketing since MAGA. Google starving its Euopean competitors from Energy is brilliant. EU is still discussing where to spend 1 billion (talk is 10, but budget is 1)... https://euaigf.b2badgen.com
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Martin Varsavsky
@martinvars
Sep 9
Google just committed at least EUR 13 billion to AI infrastructure in Finland for 2027 and 2028. Reuters and Google both call it the company’s largest single investment in Europe. The part that matters more than the racks is the power deal. Google signed a 22 year contract with
1:27 AM · Sep 10, 2026 from Augsburg, Germany
   
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Helscom
@helscom
I’ve heard Tervola referred to as “Texas of Finland”. Finland being the Texas of Europe puts them in a Texas squared sort of situation.
7:21 AM · Sep 10, 2026