Back in May, Finland told Google in writing that its new AI data center site needed an environmental review. Google kept cutting down the forest there until August. By then the crews had cleared 330 hectares in a town called Muhos. That's about 815 acres, or more than 600 football fields of northern Finnish forest. Here's how it went down, according to regulator documents that Helsingin Sanomat got hold of. Clearing started in March. In late April, Google's Finnish project company asked the regulator whether it even needed an environmental review. On May 22 the regulator wrote back and said yes, this project falls directly under the law. Satellite images show the logging kept going for three more months anyway. The rule itself is pretty specific. If you permanently clear more than 200 hectares of forest in Finland, you need the review first. Google's other site, up in Kajaani, came in at "just under 200" hectares by the company's own count. Make of that what you will. Google's defense is that every tree came down legally under Finland's Forestry Act, and honestly, that part might hold up. Finland logs something like 800,000 hectares of forest every year. Cutting trees there is about as normal as it gets. The catch is what that forestry law assumes. Finland has banned destroying forests since 1866, so if you clear a stand, you're legally on the hook to grow a new one, usually 1,800 to 2,000 seedlings per hectare within a few years. The whole country can log at that scale because every cleared hectare gets replanted. Nine data center buildings are planned for the Muhos site, and nobody's growing a forest back on top of those. The regulator found the topsoil already scraped off and roads already built. Permanent loss like that is exactly what the 200-hectare rule exists to catch, and a University of Helsinki law professor said as much, that following the forestry rules doesn't get you out of the environmental review. Add it up and more than half the Muhos project area was cleared or prepared before the review that's supposed to decide how the thing gets built. It gets messier. The Muhos building inspector told Helsingin Sanomat that Google's lawyers pressured him into signing off on the prep work. Google's Finland boss denies that and has publicly apologized for the clearing. The government ordered the work halted four weeks after Google announced €13 billion for Finland, its biggest investment in Europe. Google's fix so far is a plan to replant 130 of the 330 hectares it cut at Muhos.

A self-taught programmer from Kazakhstan helped build a company that went from making $20 million a year to making $20 million a week. Jensen Huang made his first ever trip to Kazakhstan this week, and on the same day Nvidia announced it had invested in that company. It's called Higgsfield, and in this clip Jensen calls its founders some of the brightest people in the world. The programmer is Yerzat Dulat, and he runs the models and the training infrastructure. His co-founder Alex Mashrabov had already done this once before. He built AI Factory, the face animation tech behind Snapchat's Cameos, and sold it to Snap for $166 million. Then he ran generative AI at Snap and led the team behind My AI, which got to 150 million users. In late 2023 he texted a friend that he was leaving Snap to build something really big this time, and asked if he knew a great researcher to do it with. That's pretty much how it played out. Annualized revenue was about $20 million in August 2025, $200 million by New Year's, $700 million this August, and over $1 billion in September. Most of the engineering team is in Kazakhstan. Back in January they became the country's first ever unicorn at $1.3 billion, and by August DST Global was paying $5.4 billion. Now put that next to Cursor, which everybody calls the fastest growing software company ever. When Cursor crossed $1 billion in annualized revenue last November, investors valued it at $29.3 billion. Higgsfield crossed the same line with its last priced round at under a fifth of that. Most of that money now comes from companies, too. Businesses were less than a quarter of Higgsfield's revenue in January and they're the majority now. 390 of the Fortune 500 use it, and brands like Dollar Shave Club crank out batches of ad videos every single day, where they used to shoot one for a whole campaign. And Nvidia probably saw all of this coming before almost anyone. Every version of Higgsfield has run on Nvidia chips, from L40s through Hopper and Blackwell, with Vera Rubin up next, and the platform now pushes around 12 trillion tokens a month across 150 million generations. This wasn't a bet Jensen had to make blind. Kazakhstan spent the last month throwing a national AI Month to show the world it can build serious AI companies. Pretty good timing that the guy closing it out had just invested in one.