Quarter million trees, review unfinished

The stamp at the top of this IT Home page is 2026/10/23 14:57:05. It retells a Guardian report from yesterday, October 22. The report says that to build a data center in Muhos, in northern Finland, Google cleared about 330 hectares of forest, which the page converts as 3.3 million square meters, and an estimated 250,000 trees were cut. The clearing happened before the statutory environmental impact assessment was finished, and the page also says topsoil was removed. The 250,000 is an estimate. The 330 hectares are the area of this one site. Both belong to Muhos. They should not be added to the later count from another site and treated as one audited total.

Local residents and environmental groups are also on the page. They say the site is now mud, machine ruts, and piled roots, and that muddy water may flow into streams that eventually reach the Oulujoki River. May flow is a concern. The page does not attach a water-quality measurement. Finland's permitting and supervision authority earlier this month told Google to pause work at Muhos and at Otanmaki, about 100 kilometers away, and to stop activities that would significantly change the environment by October 23. If Google does not comply, the authority may start enforcement and impose a fine. May enforce and may fine are not a fine already printed on this page.

The second tree count comes from environmentalists. It is not a repeat of the Muhos estimate. The page says that besides the 250,000 trees at Muhos, environmentalists estimate about 150,000 more were cut at Otanmaki, and they say Google illegally cut 400,000 trees in Finland. The 400,000 is their sum of the two sites. Illegal is the page's rendering of their wording. The page also says, in its own account, that the clearing happened before the statutory assessment was finished. Both sentences stay. The 400,000 is still not a single figure a court has already pronounced. Because the cutting is described as illegal, the timber cannot be sold to wood processors. That consequence is what the page states.

The head of Google Finland has apologized for the clearing. The page does not give that person's name, and this story does not add one. The judgment is therefore this: Muhos is about 330 hectares and an estimated 250,000 trees, and the assessment was not finished; about 150,000 at Otanmaki and 400,000 in total are environmentalists' estimates; the permitting authority required environment-changing work to stop by October 23, and a fine is what may follow if that order is not kept. The three counts do not collapse into one.