1,960 MWfrom the 12 active projects that report a figure
Boundaries: Natural Earth
Tracked projectBigger dot, more power16 sites shown
Norway's cheap hydropower has drawn close to 90 data centers, and the biggest projects are still being built. Nscale is building a campus at Narvik, above the Arctic Circle, for Microsoft, whose customer OpenAI will rent space; its first phase will use about 230 megawatts of power. Google is building a data center of up to 240 megawatts at Gromstul in Skien, with the first phase due to go live in 2026. TikTok runs a 90-megawatt data center built by Green Mountain and plans to grow it to 150.
The fight is over who gets the power. In 2023 the ammunition maker Nammo said electricity it needed for an expansion had gone to TikTok. On March 12, 2026, Parliament rejected a national licensing system for data centers, leaving siting decisions to municipalities, but asked the government for a bill banning data centers used for cryptocurrency mining. Another 53 data centers are registered with grid operator Statnett, which has reserved 3.4 gigawatts for them, more than 8% of the country's installed capacity.
In 2026 the government reclassified data centers as industry, which cuts them off from the cheap "concession power" that hydropower towns receive for their dammed rivers and had been selling on to data centers. Energy Minister Terje Aasland said the change was needed because data center power use is growing fast. Mayors in Sogn were furious: Luster's mayor, Andreas Wollnick Wiese, said the town's power deal with a local data center was now worthless. Rødt, which won 5% at the 2025 election, wants no new data centers until there is a national strategy.
Every project above is drawn from public records, filings and local reporting. Each row links to what it is based on. Statuses change, so check the source date before you rely on one. Found something wrong? Write to [email protected] and it gets fixed.