Google bought half a Finnish nuclear plant for 22 years

Google signed a 22-year power deal with Fortum yesterday for up to half the output of Loviisa, a two-reactor plant on the Finnish south coast that's been running since 1977. The timeline is the part that stopped me. Finland granted Loviisa an operating licence through 2050 back in 2023, but Fortum's CEO says the reactors couldn't have kept going past 2030 without roughly a billion euros of life-extension work. Nobody was funding that on spot-market hope. So the usual complaint has it backwards here. This contract is paying to keep generation online that would otherwise have shut down two decades before its own paperwork ran out. What I'm less sure about is the other side. Half of one of Finland's biggest generators is now committed to a single buyer until 2049, and the steelmakers on that same grid never got to bid for it. Google's announcement has the site list - https://www.googlecloudpresscorner.com/2026-09-09-Google-Deepens-Commitment-to-Finland-with-Two-Year-EUR13-Billion-investment-in-AI-Infrastructure