AI's Arctic Land Grab
A night shot of Narvik, Norway – the site of Nscale’s new AI Arctic hyperscale campus. Photo: Andrea Sorrentino
In the glacier-carved fjords of Northern Norway, a man sips his morning coffee and straps a harness around his two dogs as he steps outside to begin his walk to work. He describes the natural beauty of his home as a “child’s painting,” as panoramic shots capture the snow-capped peaks and cascading waterfalls that surround him. A landscape, he says, that is worth protecting. At the end of his path, he’s greeted by Alex Sharp, president of Nscale’s Data Center Group. Behind them, a massive data center. They proceed in.
This ad, published in November 2025 for Nscale, a British AI infrastructure hyperscaler, shows the start-up’s data center in Glomfjord, Norway. It markets the project as sustainable: one that uses the Arctic air and water from the nearby fjords for cooling in lieu of the estimated 300,000 gallons of water a day that a traditional data center uses. With this momentum at its back, Nscale built its newest Arctic data center even further north, in Narvik, Norway –– a project promoting the same green blueprint.
Data centers are surfacing quietly across the Arctic. On the North Slope of Alaska, Stak Energy, an Alaska-based AI energy infrastructure start-up, has proposed a three-gigawatt modular data center that sits on a 715-acre plot of land. One considerable difference between the two projects: Nscale’s Norway data centers run on renewables while Stack Energy’s does not. Yet both projects rest on the same assumption that the Arctic is an empty, cold canvas, poised for development. The Arctic’s appeal as a site for data infrastructure is not without logic, but the risks associated with operating data centers in this vulnerable region have largely gone unexamined.
The sheer quantity of water required for cooling processor chips is one of the dominant environmental concerns of data centers. On paper, the Arctic’s cold air and access to Arctic waters reduces the need for water-based cooling. Yet the cooling element is only one piece of the puzzle. Companies are flocking to Northern areas such as Narvik for the surplus of available hydropower. Villages like Narvik house a relatively small population and have a low electricity demand; this initial surplus drew Nscale to Northern Norway in a rush to seize this remaining energy. However, in April 2026, Statnett, the Norwegian company that owns and operates Norway’s power grid, halted reservations for the power grid in Northern Norway because of a surge in industrial demand. The surplus of hydropower was short lived: data centers won the race to harness it.
The pace of the AI boom does not give tech companies the five to seven years it takes to connect new clean energy projects to the grid. While Nscale seeks out this remaining hydropower in places such as Norway, for example, the company is concurrently building a data center fully reliant on fossil fuels in West Virginia. On the other side of the Arctic, Stak Energy’s data center on Alaska’s North Slope will be entirely dependent on fossil fuels, fueled by a natural gas pipeline running from petroleum fields on the North Slope. While the contract has not yet struck a deal for gas supply, the pipeline could run as long as between 25 and 90 miles along the Arctic coastal plain.
The Arctic is warming four times faster than the global average, and that warming is not contained to the circumpolar north; rather, it’s a catalyst. Arctic warming accelerates sea-level rise, wildfires, severe weather, and human displacement across the globe. A fossil-fuel-powered data center would cause CO2 emissions to skyrocket, further accelerating ice and permafrost melt and feeding a dangerous warming feedback loop.
In Alaska, a grassroots advocacy organization called Native Movement has urgently called on the public to oppose Stak Energy’s proposed data center. While the public comment period for this development closed on June 15, 2026, the organization notes that “The urgency at which our leaders and this company are pushing for this data center raises major concerns… We have no clue what the long term impacts of such a project would be in this region, from permafrost melt, to caribou migration impacts, to water contamination.”
Native Movement also disputes industry claims of long-term job creation. They note that the project, located some 21 miles from the Iñupiat community of Utqiagvik, would generate at most 60 jobs, and these benefits would be unlikely to reach local communities at all. “We’ve witnessed tech companies target rural Indigenous communities elsewhere,” the organization says, “drawing widespread opposition and critical impacts to ecosystems and local resources.”
Norway has seen a similar story unfold. The Sámi parliament sued the Norwegian government over earlier data center construction plans, as community members argued that they were not consulted before construction began. The Sámi case may be an early sign of legal battles to come, as data centers continue to multiply across the Scandinavian Arctic, bringing ecosystem disruption, excessive noise, and strain on local infrastructure.
Security could present another challenge. Northern Norway shares a border with Russia. In a TIME Magazine investigation of Nscale’s new site in Narvik, Katarzyna Zysk, a professor at the Norwegian military’s Institute for Defence Studies, warns that “in a direct conflict, we should expect this kind of infrastructure will be attacked first.” Russia has already conducted maritime missile firings near the Russia-Norwegian border. Alaska sits just 55 miles from mainland Russia at its closest point. The Pentagon has long treated the Arctic, and Alaska specifically, as a strategically significant military region. Given that proximity, it is worth asking whether the same question of security may apply to data centers built on the North Slope.
The prevailing framing of the AI race as a winner-takes-all geopolitical and national security imperative has placed policymakers under near-existential pressure to accept these risks with little meaningful debate. But a balanced assessment is called for. Local politicians need to stand up for their constituents rather than simply yield to pressure from the tech industry. With the rise in data center construction across the circumpolar north, governments should require binding environmental protections before construction begins, while ensuring that affected communities are meaningfully consulted and involved throughout the planning process.
Examining the environmental realities of Nscale in Norway and Stak Energy in Alaska reveals the fine print behind the AI industry’s green promises. The fact that environmental impact factors into these decisions at all is progress, but the reality is that the current pace of the AI explosion is effectively incompatible with any claims of growing the industry with genuinely sustainable, clean energy power. Anthropic recently called for a coordinated global slowdown of AI development until we understand how to safely proceed with the technology. The same logic should apply to building data centers in fragile ecosystems such as the Arctic.
In Nscale’s ad, the man still walks past the same landscape on his way to work where the peaks are still snow-capped, for now. Yet the clean energy surplus that drew Nscale north is waning. To rival the pace of the AI boom, companies will continue turning to fossil fuels. No one films that part.
Ashley Entwistle is a Research Intern at The Arctic Institute.