Despite Plenty Of Renewable Energy, Data Centers Split Norwegian Society

This reporting is published in collaboration with AlgorithmWatch and is supported by the European Digital Rights (EDRi), European Center for Non-For-Profit Law (ECNL), and Lighthouse Reports investigative journalism & civil society collaboration grants.

Norway may be a petrostate — the country produced more oil and gas than Kuwait or Algeria in 2024 — but it exports almost all of it. Locally, 99% of all electricity is produced by wind and hydro power. This, combined with a relative abundance of space and water, makes the country a sought-after destination for operators of data centers.

Close to 90 data centers are currently operating in Norway (not all of them dedicated to generative AI). Together, they used up 2.79 terawatt-hours of energy in 2025, slightly more than one in fifty watt-hours consumed in the country.

An additional 53 data centers are registered with the electricity network operator Statnett, which has reserved 3.4 gigawatts for them. This represents over 8% of the country’s currently installed capacity. Many more are queuing for capacity, though the operator makes clear that not all projects in the queue will see the light of day.

Several tech giants are already active in the country. TikTok hosts 50,000 servers near Oslo in a 90-MW facility, which they plan to expand to 150 MW. At this size, the site would use almost one percent of the electricity currently produced in Norway. Further south, Google is building a facility of up to 240 MW, slated to enter service this year. The company said it would be dedicated to cloud storage. OpenAI, for its part, plans to open a data center of up to 290 MW in Narvik, in the country’s north, at the end of 2026.

Norwegian industrialists have become major builders and operators of data centers. Green Mountain, which built the TikTok facility, also develops server farms in Germany and England. Aker, Norway’s largest conglomerate, is building OpenAI’s Narvik project.

The data center boom could disrupt household electricity provision were it not for making power more expensive. In the country’s south, one kilowatt-hour costs one Norwegian crown, or about ten euro cents. Although this is only one-third of what German households pay for electricity produced from renewable sources, it is seen as high by Norwegian standards. In October 2025, the government introduced a fixed-price scheme that caps the price of a kilowatt-hour at 50 øre (half a crown, five euro cents). The government allocated almost one billion euros for the scheme until the end of 2026, even though the fixed-price might increase up to 77 øre per kWh.

Although the scheme might alleviate fears of expensive electricity in the south of the country, where the vast majority of the population resides, it does nothing for the north. There, electricity is much cheaper, at around 30 øre per kilowatt-hour at market prices.

Large infrastructure projects could disrupt more than budgets. Already, plans to electrify a 350-MW gas production facility near Hammerfest, in the far north, are causing an uproar. The project would require the building of new wind turbines and high-voltage transmission lines. Affected people are overwhelmingly Sámi herders, who are part of a historically discriminated-against group in the country. The Sámi parliament is suing the Norwegian government, arguing that they should have been consulted on the matter. Narvik, where several data centers are being built, lies several hundreds of kilometers to the south of Hammerfest, but the case brought forward by the Sámi parliament might be a sign of future legal challenges across northern Norway.

Conflicts around electricity access are already rife among industrialists in the south. Nammo, Norway’s largest ammunition manufacturer, made headlines in 2023 when it revealed that TikTok had been awarded the electric power they would have needed for an expansion of their facilities. Nammo’s boss even raised the possibility that the Chinese government purposefully asked TikTok to select a location near an ammunition factory, though he did not provide any evidence.

Attribution of electric capacity is currently done on a first-come, first-served basis. The government is planning a change in the Energy Act to make it possible to prioritize national security projects. A public consultation was carried out in 2025, but the bill has yet to pass through parliament. (Meanwhile, Nammo did begin construction of its new arms factory).

Others are much more radical. Rødt, a left-wing party that won 5% of the vote in the 2025 general election, favors a total ban on new data centers until a national strategy is in place. No other party shares this view, though Lars Haltbrekken, of the left-wing SV party, or the non-governmental organization Friends of the Earth Norway would like a partial ban. They make a hierarchy of data centers, where cloud storage is considered useful and facilities dedicated to cryptocurrency mining would be banned. GenAI would fall in the middle.