Designs for a Cooler Planet
Discover tomorrow at Aalto University's biggest exhibition! Open 1 September – 30 October 2026.
Europe hosts the servers, others reap the rewards?
Building data centers brings investments and jobs to Finland and Europe. But in the future, will the EU be anything more than an electricity producer serving foreign tech giants?
Electricity consumption by data centers operating in the EU has tripled over the past decade and reached 70 TWh last year. That is about 2% of all electricity consumed in the EU –approximately 80% of Finland’s total annual electricity use.
Data centers maintain critical digital services on which our societies have become dependent. At present, however, well over two-thirds of that 70 TWh is consumed by data center operators coming from outside Europe, highlighting in particular the dominant position of U.S. companies in the data market.
‘Profits are therefore flowing out of the EU through fiber-optic cables into the pockets of tech giants,’ says Kaarlo Liukkonen, a doctoral researcher specializing in digital dependencies.
Find this and dozens of other fresh perspectives, bold experiments and practical solutions in the autumn exhibition.
