Our aim in collaborative blog post is to bring up relevant issues to consider when planning on new data centers to ensure the resilience of the locals that are not always heard in the decision-making processes. The objective is to integrate various perspectives of relevance by using a multi-disciplinary approach to local resilience.
From the psychology perspective, it is central to consider psychological wellbeing of both individuals and the wider community. To the best of our knowledge, to the current day data centers have not been in the focus of psychological research. However, literature on environmental and social psychology as well as psychological research on resilience and coping can be applied to the current context.
Data centers can present various risks for the psychological wellbeing of the local community. For example, literature on open-cut coal mines suggests that vast environmental changes in the local environment are likely to cause stress and various difficult environmental emotions in the local community. This has been brought up by Australian scholar Glenn Albrecht, who invented a word solastalgia to describe distress related to environmental changes that influence people while they are directly connected to their home environment.
In addition, if local people have strong place attachment (i.e. strong emotional bond towards a certain place that is perceived as important) to their local environment and if building of a data center is causing environmental destruction, stress related to loss of place can result. Furthermore, applying research on environmental psychology, both the building of and the functioning of the data center can cause both acute and chronic environmental stressors, such as noise and pollution, especially in people living close to the construction site and the data center.
It has been pointed out in international research literature that housing for more marginalized groups is often placed near industrial sites, and therefore stress and risks for both physical and psychological wellbeing are carried by the people living next to the industrial area. Thus, there is a need to ensure that building of new data centers doesn’t cause and worsen existing inequalities in the local community.
On the other hand, data centers could influence community resilience in a positive way, as well. Drawing from foundational theories in social psychology, if the community sees the data center as an external threat, it could strengthen sense of community and thus increase the resilience of a local community.
However, the wider community needs to be considered from the perspective of individual’s emotion regulation; for example, normativity of certain emotions related to the data centers in the local community could influence how a member of that community regulates their emotions. There could also be conflicting emotions in the individuals of the community, for example, if the community perceives the data center as something positive as it brings employment to the area but an individual experiences environmental stress or other difficult emotions related to the construction of the data center.
On the other hand, if the community at large views data center as something negative, but an individual benefits from it, for example, by getting employment, it can also cause conflicting emotions and thoughts, and the community’s sense of what is normal to feel and think related to the data center can affect individuals’ ability to express and cope with these emotions.
Finally, drawing from the coping and resilience literature, how an individual and the community cope with adversities related to construction of the data center is the key for understanding how it influences local psychological resilience. Drawing from literature on coping with climate change, meaning-focused coping – i.e. finding meaning and cultivating positive emotions, especially when individuals lack control over the situation – could be important to promote in both individual and community level. Meaning-focused coping could be especially important if the locals feel like they don’t have much power to influence the decision-making regarding a new data center.
From the education perspective, if we think about education institutions, the arrival of data centers in small towns can make local schools rethink their curricula.
On the one hand, education institutions may choose to adapt their educational offerings to better align with the technical skills demanded by the data center industry. This could open doors for students to pursue careers in fields such as technology and data management. On the other hand, this shift may come at the expense of traditional educational values, potentially reducing investment and interest in fields such as arts and humanities.
For educators, the presence of data centers introduces new tools, fresh ideas, and modern pedagogical approaches. While this can be exciting, it also brings pressure. Not all teachers feel prepared or qualified to teach tech-related content, and some may be reluctant to change their teaching approaches. This can lead to stress, resistance, and a need for professional development and support.
Finally, students stand to gain from increased exposure to technology, with many developing new interests and thriving in tech-related subjects. However, this shift also carries the risk of deepening educational inequalities. Education can reproduce social inequalities when access to resources and support is uneven. As such, students with learning difficulties or those from less-privileged, non-tech-oriented backgrounds might struggle to keep pace. As a result, the existing educational gap could widen, which makes equitability and inclusiveness more important than ever.
From a business perspective, large data center investments are not just technical projects. They reshape local labor markets, municipal finances, energy systems, and the position of small and medium sized enterprises. For Finnish cities the key question is whether these investments strengthen or weaken the long-term resilience of local communities.
Large projects bring clear benefits. Construction creates jobs and orders for local suppliers, new services emerge around the sites and municipalities receive property tax income that can partly replace revenues from declining traditional industries. Hosting data centers also signal that the region is a credible digital hub with stable institutions, reliable infrastructure and low carbon energy, which can attract further investments in digital services and high skill work.
At the same time, value does not automatically stay local. Many hyperscale centers are foreign owned and employ relatively few people once construction is finished, often in maintenance and security rather than innovation. If local firms mainly provide low margin services while profits flow abroad, the impact on long term prosperity remains modest. There is also a risk that tax incentives and low electricity prices for large users shift costs to households and smaller businesses, especially when facilities are very energy intensive and only modestly labour intensive.
Resilient local economies need dependable digital infrastructure but also strong local linkages. This is connected to business resilience, which means keeping operations running, adapting to change, and recovering quickly when disruptions occur. Data centers support business continuity when they provide reliable and competitively priced capacity that help firms in sectors like healthcare, logistics, finance and manufacturing to operate without disruption and keep sensitive data within the EU. Local resilience improves further when operators build long-term relationships with local suppliers, collaborate with schools and universities on skills, join innovation networks and connect their investments to broader development goals instead of remaining isolated technical islands.
For local communities, the way data centers use energy is also a core business concern. High demand can strain the grid, yet well designed projects can become part of the solution. Many Finnish facilities pursue high energy efficiency, rely on low carbon power and increasingly feed waste heat into district heating networks, which supports the transition away from coal and other fossil fuels. Data centers can also act as flexible electricity loads and help balance production and demand, which supports more stable prices for local firms and households.
From a business resilience viewpoint, the key question is who actually benefits and who carries the risks, and this is rarely straightforward. Whether data centers act as partners that share value, risks, and responsibilities with the host community depends on multiple factors, such as how investments create diverse local employment, strengthen local supply chains, contribute transparently to municipal finances, and support sustainable energy solutions. When these conditions are met, data centers can become genuine pillars of local economic resilience rather than just large external customers of land and electricity.
Building new data centers in Finland demands us to consider local resilience, paying attention to psychological and economic wellbeing of local communities and their members; educational opportunities, dangers on widening existing gaps in inequalities, as well as perspectives of local and national businesses and investments.
While constructing data centers can bring local communities employment and education potential besides economic growth, multidisciplinary approaches to resilience are needed to ensure that the costs – be they personal, community-level or national, or related to education, economy, or psychological wellbeing – don’t grow higher than the benefits experienced by the local communities. From a business perspective, this means that data center projects should clearly strengthen local jobs, skills, tax bases, and sustainable energy solutions instead of mainly shifting costs to the host communities.
The writers of this blog post are doctoral researchers Mia-Kristina Lager from School of Marketing and Communication / International Business, University of Vaasa, Sonja Palmo from FRONT research programme and Faculty of Education and Psychology, University of Oulu, and Weimu You from the Unit of Industrial Engineering and Management at the Faculty of Technology, University of Oulu. The researchers met at Resilience Autumn School arranged by The Resilience Academy of Oulu (RAO) and Frontiers of Arctic and Global Resilience (FRONT) research programme in Autumn 2025, and the blog post was part of the School´s collaborative research.
The Exploring resilience blog discusses the current themes of research, teaching and development of resilience, i.e., crisis resistance and deepens knowledge about the management of global change, and possible solutions to the wicked problems of sustainability. The authors are researchers and experts in the field, and members of the cooperation networks of the University of Oulu’s FRONT PROFI7 research programme.