Fortum Oyj

J.P. Morgan analysts said Europe's accelerating data centre buildout could strengthen the case for new nuclear capacity as technology companies seek dependable, low-carbon electricity to power AI infrastructure. European data centre electricity consumption could rise from about 70 TWh currently to roughly 115 TWh by 2030, according to European Commission estimates cited in the report, and J.P. Morgan forecasts an additional 89 TWh of annual European data centre power demand by 2030 compared with 2023, with Iberia and the Nordics accounting for about 45% of the increase. Europe's announced data centre pipeline stood at 66.1 GW at the end of 2025, compared with 10.8 GW of live capacity. Google recently agreed to a 22-year power purchase agreement with Fortum covering nuclear generation in Finland, carrying an estimated premium of roughly 60% to forward electricity prices, following similar nuclear agreements by Microsoft, Meta, Amazon and Google in the United States. Small modular reactors could play a larger role as demand grows, though Europe currently has no operating commercial SMRs, with the first projects targeted for the early 2030s, and the European Commission estimates €241 billion of investment will be required through 2050 for new large reactors and lifetime extensions.

Google will invest at least €13 billion, or about $15.1 billion, in AI infrastructure in Finland over the next two years, its biggest European investment, including three new data centers and a 22-year deal for up to 50% of the output of one of Finland's two nuclear power plants. The agreement with Finnish utility Fortum is Google's first nuclear energy deal outside the United States, and Fortum's stock jumped as much as 15.5% on the news, its biggest gain in Europe that day. The deal covers up to 50% of the electricity generated by Finland's Loviisa nuclear plant and gives Fortum greater economic certainty to extend and upgrade the plant through 2050. The Finnish project adds to Alphabet's already enormous AI spending program, with the company having raised its 2026 global capital investment target to $195 billion-$205 billion. Alphabet shares fell 2.3% after the Finland announcement, underlining market concern that rapidly rising AI investment could pressure returns before the resulting revenue growth fully materializes.

Fortum Oyj has signed a multi-decade power purchase agreement with Google that links its future Loviisa nuclear output to the tech company, giving the utility clearer long-term revenue visibility around its planned lifetime extension investments. The deal comes as Fortum shares have returned 19.3% over the past month, 28.3% year to date, and 59.3% on a one-year total shareholder return basis. Fortum is also executing a sizable fixed cost reduction program that will lower its recurring annual fixed cost base by €100 million by 2026, while leverage remains low at 1.0 times and liquidity is very strong. Against a narrative fair value of €20.37 and a last close of €23.73, the stock trades at a premium that one popular narrative labels 16.5% overvalued, though a Simply Wall St discounted cash flow model estimates future cash flows support a value of €45.92 per share, 48.3% above the current price. The narrative could shift quickly if rising tax and regulatory costs bite harder than expected, or if hydro and nuclear availability disappoints.

President Trump called AI data centers "the oil of the next 50 years" during an appearance on Laura Ingraham's The Ingraham Angle, arguing the buildout is delivering wealth and investment to American communities, while singling out Google for building a data center in Finland and saying he "wasn't happy about that." The remarks land as Google CEO Sundar Pichai describes a company building the physical layer of that new economy at unprecedented scale, telling analysts on the July 22, 2026 call that Google is "supply constrained" and that "the demand still outpaces that investment." Google's Q2 revenue reached $119.80 billion, up 24.2% year over year, with Google Cloud accelerating to $24.77 billion, up 82%, a Cloud backlog of $514 billion, and EPS of $9.11 against a $3.0427 estimate. Q2 capital expenditures hit $44.92 billion, up 100.14% year over year, driving free cash flow to negative $5.855 billion, while long-term debt jumped from $46.5 billion to $98.2 billion and full-year 2026 capex is guided to $175 billion to $185 billion. The Finland project Trump referenced is Google's single largest AI investment in Europe, a €13 billion ($15.1 billion) commitment across 2027 and 2028 that includes a 22-year nuclear power deal covering up to 50% of Fortum's Loviisa plant output through 2050, projected to add roughly €3.6 billion to Finnish GDP during construction and support 7,000 jobs annually once operational. Trump's claim that community backlash against data centers is a Chinese PR campaign glosses over hard numbers: U.S. electricity prices rose 6.1% year over year, roughly 61% faster than CPI's 3.8%, and AI data-center draw is projected to rise 14-fold by 2028 to 12% of U.S. electricity consumption.

The compute landlord thesis went global this week as Google, NVIDIA and SpaceX each moved to lock down power, distribution and capacity. Google committed €13B to Finland, securing a 22-year power purchase agreement with the Fortum Loviisa nuclear plant. NVIDIA reportedly agreed to acquire Hugging Face for $12.9B, taking control of the main conduit for open-weight models such as Qwen and DeepSeek, which account for 61% of tokens consumed on OpenRouter. At SpaceX, an undisclosed tenant signed a $13.3B annual commitment, lifting total ARR for the hosting unit to roughly $41B across four pillars — Anthropic, Google, Reflection AI and the mystery customer — with 90-day termination clauses starting in 2027. In China, prices for Huawei and Cambricon AI chips are surging 20% to 50% as export controls push manufacturers into grey-market high-bandwidth memory; the Huawei Ascend 950DT now carries an indicated price above 250,000 yuan, roughly $37,000 per accelerator, while Cambricon's forthcoming 690 chip has been repriced 20% to 30% higher than quotes from two months earlier. DeepSeek V4.1 Flash cuts inference costs by 80% through its Causal Encoder-Decoder architecture, compressing cache-hit costs to $0.003 per token, and Positron AI raised an $875M Series C at a $5B valuation for its Asimov chip, which swaps scarce high-bandwidth memory for commodity LPDDR5X and claims 90% bandwidth utilization against NVIDIA's typical 30%.

Google will invest a record $15 billion in AI infrastructure anchored by three northern data centers and a long-dated agreement to buy a large share of the output from Fortum's Loviisa nuclear plant in Finland, with deliveries running for roughly two decades starting at the end of this decade. The contract, first detailed by the Wall Street Journal, converts wholesale electricity into a fixed and knowable cost through 2049, directly compressing the cost per AI token as Google Cloud backlog approaches $460 billion. Management guided 2026 capex to $175 to $185 billion, after $91.45 billion in 2025, while free cash flow was negative $5.86 billion in Q2 and long-term debt climbed from $46.5 billion to $98.2 billion. Deliveries do not begin until the end of this decade, so the deal will not lower Alphabet's 2026 or 2027 power bill, and peers including Microsoft, Amazon, and Meta can pursue similar European nuclear offtakes. Shares trade at $330.65, up 38.34% over one year, on a trailing P/E of 17x against an analyst target of $428.07.

Alphabet signed the first nuclear agreement in Google's history, a partnership with Fortum to extend and uprate Finland's Loviisa nuclear plant through 2050. Loviisa already supplies 10% of Finland's electricity and could not have continued operating beyond 2030 without the investment; Fortum is running a 1 billion euro investment programme, with roughly 80% of projects and 700 million euros of capital expenditure still pending final decisions. Google paired the deal with 629 MW of contracted onshore wind, a 94 MW battery near Kajaani due to be operational in late 2027, and demand response capabilities, and the same morning committed 13 billion euros to AI infrastructure in Finland. The move came six days after Jim Cramer said on air that building a nuclear plant is "a lot harder" than the market appreciates, and one day before Holtec Nuclear filed its S-1 to list on Nasdaq under ticker HNUC with proceeds earmarked for accelerating SMR-300 licensing, deployment, and manufacturing capacity. Alphabet trades at $330.56, down 7.48% over the past month but up 38.31% year over year, on a P/E of 15.

Google, under Alphabet, announced an investment of at least 13 billion euros, or approximately 15.1 billion dollars, in artificial intelligence infrastructure in Finland over two years, marking Google's largest investment in Europe. The plan covers the construction of three new data centers in northern Finland, along with upgrades to the power grid, clean energy projects, and energy storage systems to support services including Gemini, Search, Maps, and YouTube. A key point of the deal is a 22-year long-term power purchase agreement with Fortum, a Finnish energy company, under which Google can receive up to 50% of the output from one of Finland's nuclear power plants. This is Google's first nuclear power purchase agreement outside the United States and helps Fortum extend the life of the Loviisa nuclear power plant to 2050. Fortum shares surged more than 15% after the deal was announced. Meanwhile, Alphabet has raised its global investment plan for this year to approximately 195 billion to 205 billion dollars, and Google estimates that its investments in 2027 and 2028 will generate about 3.6 billion euros for the Finnish economy during construction and support roughly 7,000 jobs per year once operations begin.

International energy terminal operator KN Energies has joined the Baltic Energy Initiative, an ORLEN-led partnership of 14 energy companies and organizations from nine Northern and Central European countries. The initiative aims to strengthen regional energy security, infrastructure resilience, and competitiveness through joint projects. Priorities include offshore wind, LNG and bioLNG market integration, a regional hydrogen market, carbon transport and storage, and small modular reactors. The partners will also cooperate on critical infrastructure protection and seek EU and international funding. Signatories include Eesti Energia, Enefit, Fortum, DNV Energy Systems, Topsoe, Siemens Energy, Adven, Steady Energy, P2X Solutions, Latvenergo, Gasgrid Finland, and Vestas.

The global second-life battery market is projected to grow from USD 15.4 billion in 2025 to USD 46.9 billion by 2035, at a compound annual growth rate of 11.8 percent, according to a new report by Custom Market Insights. The market is expected to reach USD 17.2 billion in 2026. Growth is driven by sustainability incentives, circular economy policies, and the increasing need for cost-effective energy storage to support renewable energy integration and grid decentralization. North America held the largest market share in 2025, while Asia Pacific is forecast to grow at the highest CAGR during the forecast period. Key players include Connected Energy, Fortum, Redwood Materials, and Moment Energy, which closed a USD 15 million Series A funding round in January 2024.