Before Google’s arrival a few months ago, an estimated quarter of a million trees occupied the 330 hectares (815 acres) of forest near the town of Muhos in rural northern Finland. Now they are all gone.

The news that the tech company illegally stripped the entire area to build a datacentre, after it failed to complete the necessary environmental impact assessments before clearcutting the land, has prompted national outcry over what role, if any, Finland should play in the global rush to build datacentres to keep up with rapid AI development.

Google’s Finland country manager, Antti Järvinen, has apologised for the forest clearings but claimed the company had acted “on the best understanding we had of the legislation at the time”.

With 145 new datacentres at various stages of planning, the Guardian’s Nordic correspondent, Miranda Bryant, looks at why Finland has found itself at the forefront of tech companies’ latest AI push - and speaks to the ecologist Mari Annala about the impact of Google’s tree-felling on the local environment.