The US technology company Google is acquiring four parcels of land in the municipalities of Muhos and Kajaani, southeast of Oulu, from the Finnish state forestry company Metsähallitus. On November 28, the Finnish government approved the sale of 1,400 hectares of land, which have mostly been in commercial forestry use. The total value of the transaction is €27 million.
Google has been operating data centers in Finland since 2011 and plans to expand its cloud and data center infrastructure on the newly acquired land. The use of the land for the planned purpose will require statutory land use planning, according to the joint press release from the Finnish government, the Finnish Ministry of Agriculture and Metsähallitus. The Ministry of the Environment, the Finnish Heritage Agency, the Ministry of Defense and the Ministry of the Interior did not see any “impediments to the transfer” of the parcels to Google.
Innovative forest management and raw material source
Inter Ikea Group has signed an agreement with Swedish alternative investment fund Skogsfond Baltikum to acquire around 8,080 hectares of forests in various parts of Latvia. The forestlands are FSC-certified and are intended to enable the furniture group to manage part of its wood supply in the Baltic states itself as well as to develop new methods for responsible forest management within the Ikea value chain. The transaction is expected to be closed by the end of the year.
Ikea says it has strict requirements for responsible forest management for all the wood in its supply chain. This also includes identifying areas with high conservation value in which forestry should be restricted or prohibited, as the Ikea Group emphasizes.
