Currently only small planes can take off and land at Nuuk Airport
A new international airport will soon open in Greenland’s capital Nuuk, allowing larger aircraft to land for the first time – paving the way for direct flights from the US and Europe.
It’s the first of three airport projects that officials hope will boost the local economy, by making the Arctic territory more accessible than ever before.
Covered by an ice cap and sparsely populated, Greenland is a vast autonomous territory within the Kingdom of Denmark.
Its capital Nuuk, on the southwestern coast, is a small town of 18,000 residents. Modern apartment blocks and colourful wooden cottages look out over a wide sea fjord.
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Sitting on a hillside above the city, small 35-seater propeller planes take off and land from a tarmac airstrip. Currently anyone wishing to fly overseas first has to take one of these aircraft 200 miles (319km) north to a remote former military airport at Kangerlussuaq, and then change to a larger plane.
Built by the Americans during World World II, Kangerlussuaq is currently one of only two runways on Greenland long enough for big jets. The other is Narsarsuaq in the far south of the country, and that was also a former US military base.
But from the end of November, large planes will be able to land at Nuuk for the first time, thanks to a new longer runway, and a sleek new terminal building.
Greenland has much to interest tourists
“I think it will be a big impact,” says Jens Lauridsen, the chief executive of operator Greenland Airports. “I’m sure we will see a lot of tourism, and we’ll see a lot of change.”
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As I visit, diggers are shifting piles of rubble along the edge of the extended runway, and the finishing touches are being applied to the new terminal.
From 28 November, direct flights to Nuuk will operate from Copenhagen, carrying more than 300 passengers. And next summer, United Airlines will begin flying from New York, as Nuuk becomes Greenland’s main travel hub.
“We have been shut from the whole world, and now we’re going to open to the world,” says one young Nuuk resident. “It’s so exciting that we’re going to have the opportunity to travel from here to another country.”
In 2026, a second international airport will open in Greenland’s most popular tourist destination, the town of Ilulissat, 350 miles north of Nuuk. Ilulissat is renowned for the huge icebergs that float just off its coastline. A new regional airport, in Qaqartoq, the biggest town in the south of Greenland, will then follow.
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Another young Greenlander from Nuuk, Isak Finn, says he won’t miss having to change plans at Kangerlussuaq. “It takes a long time. You have to wait, and then if there’s bad weather or not enough planes, you get stuck there. It’s so annoying.”
Jacob Nitter Sorensen, chief executive of national carrier Air Greenland, says that the new international airport in Nuuk is “going to be a big game changer for us”. “It’s going to shorten the travel time, and it’s going to decrease the cost of producing the flight.
Ticket prices are already lower, he says, and as demand grows, the airline hopes to add new European and North American routes, and potentially invest in new aircraft. But stiff competition is expected as bigger international airlines enter the market.
“A flight from Europe to Nuuk is a little more than four hours,” says Jens Lauridsen. “From the US East Coast is also four hours. So we’re placed right in the middle. There is a very, very big interest from all major carriers in Europe.”
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To make way for Nuuk International Airport’s longer runway, six million cubic meters of rock were blasted and leveled. The airport is also now equipped with advanced technology that allows planes to land in the town’s notoriously bad weather.
Cold conditions and the short summer season have been a challenge for construction work. While the cost of obtaining explosives ballooned, after war broke out in Ukraine.
The three airports are together costing more than $800m (£615m). This has been partly financed by the Danish, who stepped in with a sweetened loan package after interest from Chinese investors.
“There were concerns about whether this type of investments should be in Chinese hands,” explains Javier Arnaut, who’s the head of Arctic social science at Greenland University. “Denmark offered more affordable and attractive rates for these loans.”
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Air Greenland boss Jacob Nitter Sorensen describes Nuuk’s new airport as a “game changer”
Initially there was public skepticism over costs and the environmental impact, says Mr Arnaut, but now there’s mostly support. Not everyone welcomes the noisy aeroplanes, however.
“With big infrastructure it always divides people,” Nuuk resident Karen Motzfeldt tells the BBC. “There is always a group who is against, and always a group with who loves it. So it’s the same in Nuuk.”
“This is an airport for a modern Greenland,” she adds. “l look forward to having a shorter route for Copenhagen, Iceland, or maybe London Heathrow, who knows?”
Greenland’s economy is largely dependent on the public sector and fishing, and most goods have to be imported, but there are efforts to diversify. Politicians hope this new infrastructure will be a shot in the arm for sectors like mining and tourism.
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“In all these cases, infrastructure is key. It makes everything easier,” says Naaja Nathanielsen, Greenland’s Minister of Business, Trade and Mineral Resources, adding that, the ease of travel will also help the government grow bilateral relations.
With larger cargo planes soon to be able to land in Nuuk, more goods can come in, and exports can more easily go out.
Inside a harbour-side factory in the capital, a huge catch of prawns is being steamed, shelled and frozen. For its owner, Greenlandic company Polar Seafoods, which sells shrimps, crab and halibut, shorter and direct flights mean new business possibilities.
“We’re looking into doing more fresh seafood,” says chairperson, Michael Binzer.
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Currently their products are exported in frozen form by container ship, destined for markets like China, Scandinavia and the UK. But the company has been trialling airfreight ahead of the new airport opening.
However, it’s tourism that will be the big winner. Foreign visitors came to Greenland in record numbers last year, rising 36.5% from 2022, to more than 140,000. That’s still modest, but with more flight options it is projected to grow.
“We are already in a tourist boom, and feeling how tourism can affect smaller places in a good way, but also negatively,” says Ms Nathanielsen, who’s overseeing a new tourism law that will be introduced this autumn.
“We really want to try to welcome the tourists in the bigger cities, but we also want to spread them out more.”
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Much excavation work has been carried out to extend Nuuk Airport’s runway
In Nuuk, many tourism businesses are eagerly preparing. “Everyone is very excited about how it’s going to be,” says Maren-Louise Paulsen Kristensen, co-owner and manager of Inuk Hostel.
The business has invested in new glass igloo huts to attract tourists year-round.
Elsewhere, new hotel plans are slowly emerging, but a shortage of accommodation could still put the brakes on efforts to expand tourism. Ms Kristensen says Nuuk needs more rooms, local guides and workers.
Yet she is also concerned that Greenland may “develop tourism too fast… that happened in Iceland, so I think we have a lot of things we can learn from them.”
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Business Minister Naaja Nathanielsen says the new airports will have a “profound” impact on the local society. “I sense that it’s going to really change the map of Greenland.
“This will bring a lot of good, but also some changes we’ll probably need to adjust to.”
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For years, airlines, accommodation websites, and ride hailing apps have been adjusting their prices in real time, responding to periods of higher and lower demand. It’s known as dynamic or surge pricing, but powered by algorithms and artificial intelligence, surge pricing is now being used across a growing number of consumer industries, from theme parks to restaurants, retail outlets, and rock concerts.
In the retail industry, the practise is especially prevalent in online marketplaces. Amazon changes prices 2.5mn times a day across all its product lines, using millions of real time data points to benchmark against competitors and track demand surges. For sellers, dynamic pricing allows a product to have multiple price points, which can lead to increased revenues. A 2018 study by researchers at MIT found that dynamic pricing boosted airline revenues by between 1 per cent and 4 per cent.
One barrier to surge pricing for bricks and mortar retailers has been the time consuming task of physically changing in-store price labels, but the use of electronic labels is rising. In the US, for example, grocery giant Walmart plans to instal them in 2,300 stores by 2026. Its nearest rival, Kroger, began testing the tech in 2018 and has since expanded it to 500 stores across the country.
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A 2023 report found that dynamic food pricing could increase supermarket gross margins by 3 per cent, but some are wary of the impact it could have on more essential goods like groceries. In August, two US senators announced they would be launching an investigation into Kroger’s digital price tags, due in part to concerns the technology will enable price gouging.
Even in non-essentials, dynamic pricing is coming under increased scrutiny. This September, ministers in the UK announced plans to probe its use for rock band Oasis’s concerts that saw ticket prices skyrocket. For regulators, another concern, across all industries, are the algorithms driving dynamic pricing. They often incorporate competitors’ prices, and there is mounting evidence that can encourage implicit collusion between firms, raising prices overall.
Surge pricing can also conceal price gouging in markets where there is fixed supply and little transparency. The promise of dynamic pricing is that it better matches supply and demand, producing greater economic efficiencies. But if companies want to use it more widely, their biggest battle may be convincing regulators and consumers that dynamic pricing isn’t just a more efficient way of increasing corporate profits.
TikTok-owner, ByteDance, says it has sacked an intern for “maliciously interfering” with the training of one of its artificial intelligence (AI) models.
But the firm rejected reports about the extent of the damage caused by the unnamed individual, saying they “contain some exaggerations and inaccuracies”.
BBC News has contacted ByteDance to request further details about the incident.
The Chinese technology giant’s Doubao ChatGPT-like generative AI model is the country’s most popular AI chatbot.
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“The individual was an intern with the commercialisation technology team and has no experience with the AI Lab,” ByteDance said in a statement.
“Their social media profile and some media reports contain inaccuracies.”
Its commercial online operations, including its large language AI models, were unaffected by the intern’s actions, the company added.
ByteDance also denied reports that the incident caused more than $10m of damage by disrupting an AI training system made up of thousands of powerful graphics processing units (GPU).
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Aside from firing the person in August, ByteDance said it had informed the intern’s university and industry bodies about the incident.
The social media giant has been investing heavily in AI technology, which it uses to power not only its Doubao chatbot but also many other applications, including a text-to-video tool called Jimeng.
I was delighted to catch sight of a headline that spoke of a “shot in the arm for active fund industry” (October 5). Could it be that active fund managers are finally showing that the application of highly rewarded brain power is paying off for those whose money they manage? Will the clients at long last have their yachts?
But no, plus ça change! It turns out after all that what the active fund industry is really, really good at is not the delivery of great value for its clients but relieving them of their wealth through extortionate fees. Bravo!
Emirates is extending its immersive virtual training platform MIRA to cover also safety training. The airline’s nearly 23,000-strong – and rapidly growing – cabin crew team will soon be able to complete their recurrent SEP (Safety & Emergency Procedures) training on MIRA, bolstering their skills while they remain responsible for the safety of millions of travellers every year.
The self-guided virtual training has been designed to meet the requirements of GCAA and other regulatory bodies, while maintaining the integrity and quality of Emirates’ exceptional training programmes.
Gillian Tett was, as ever, on the money when she wrote “Data centres alone won’t stop the AI energy squeeze” (Opinion, October 5). But beyond the need for joined-up thinking from the market and governments to increase energy supply, the article misses a faster and cheaper way to stop the energy squeeze caused by the growth in artificial intelligence — namely making data centres fundamentally more energy efficient.
Eric Schmidt, former Google CEO, noted that AI has an infinite appetite for energy, so increasing grid capacity is no doubt essential to realising AI’s full potential. However, AI moves faster than our ability to increase grid capacity. Increasing grid capacity requires enormous capital investment, governmental and regulatory change, and public approval — it is not a simple task, nor one achieved quickly.
Tett highlights the fact that market forces alone cannot solve this and notes the need for government to create connected grid capacity and adjudicate distribution of the limited energy supply fairly.
However, the article, and the wider debate, pays scant attention to the huge energy waste in data centres.
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Take the network switch — the workhorse of every data centre, shuttling data packets between clusters of graphic processing units and central processing units. Network switches alone consume 20 per cent of a data centre’s total power requirement but state of the art technology now allows for that to be reduced to less than 1 per cent. Efficiency gains are waiting to be realised across every element of the data centre technology stack and should be prioritised.
Any increase in grid capacity must be twinned with making data centres more energy efficient and sustainable. Where technologies exist that use lower power and offer equal or better performance, these should be promoted and prioritised, by the industry — and yes, also by government through policy and regulation.
This can be achieved in part by earmarking a portion of the enormous capital slated to expand energy supply to support and incentivise the roll out of efficient data centre technologies. It can also be achieved by implementing regulation in the spirit of Germany’s recently passed Energy Efficiency Act which mandates power usage effectiveness levels for data centres, forcing owner and operators to build sustainably.
Market forces alone will not drive change — government support and incentives for data centre and AI companies to invest in technologies that enable energy-efficient, sustainable AI will be required.
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Mark Rushworth Chief Executive & Founder, Finchetto, Guildford, Surrey, UK
I much enjoyed the column by Catherine De Vries and her lamentation on the rise of political entrepreneurship as evidenced by Donald Trump and, presumably, Nigel Farage (“We are moving from democracy to ‘emocracy’”, Opinion, October 11).
It nicely balanced the more standard FT opinion page fare on that day — “How to rescue spinouts from the ‘valley of death’” and “Animal spirits of British business need to be lifted” — both of which argued that increased entrepreneurship is the key to salvaging the UK’s faltering economy.
However, it seems a little ironic that De Vries should hark back to a golden age when politicians supposedly focused on “facts and evidence” and not “rhetorical style” or “emotions and feelings”. The return to a better past is precisely the defining narrative of these very “political entrepreneurs”.
Make America Great Again, indeed.
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Tim Gordon Partner, Best Practice AI CEO, Liberal Democrats 2011-17 London N1, UK
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