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> This would be a big misstep for Finland. At the moment, the old forest industry & export is dying off, with no replacement in sight. A viable candidate would
by jabl 10y ago
> This would be a big misstep for Finland. At the moment, the old forest industry & export is dying off, with no replacement in sight. A viable candidate would be datacenters
Yes, this vision has been thrown about, but they thing is, even if the wildest predictions were to come through, the employment generated by these large-scale datacenters is a small fraction of the jobs lost in other industries. And most of these jobs are relatively low-paying ones such as perimeter security, replacing faulty servers etc. A far cry from, say, the hordes of engineers employed by the telecom sector during the boom years.
Sure, they may indirectly generate a lot of jobs, but you don't need to live next to (or even in the same country as) an Amazon, Google, or whomever's, gigantic datacenter in order to use it.
- aleksei 10y agoWell yes, my wording may have been off: the factory workers will remain unemployed no matter what. But converting factories to data centres would be a way to avoid demolition, and create a demand for specialised tech knowledge and make Finland somewhat relevant to the internet, which is what the government is after.
- taneliv 10y agoRegarding government's desire for internet relevancy, it would make a lot more sense to first gain the companies' trust and commitment to Finnish datacenters. And only then change the laws (or even more sensibly, just perform surveillance illegally).