Nebius, the AI infrastructure company founded by former Yandex chief Arkady Volozh, is widening its European footprint with a new AI data center in Finland. The planned 310 MW facility in Lappeenranta carries a price tag of $10 billion and is set to start coming online in stages from 2027.
The project is big even by the feverish standards of the AI buildout. It also fits a pattern: the winners in this race are not just model makers, but the companies supplying the electricity-guzzling plumbing underneath them. Nebius has already signed more than $40 billion in deals with Microsoft and Meta for AI compute, so a site this large is less a bet than an industrial response to demand.
Lappeenranta becomes Nebius’s biggest site outside the US
Nebius says the Finnish project will be its tenth data center and the largest outside the US. The contractor is Polarnode, a Finnish company, and the new campus is being built in Lappeenranta, near the Russian border in eastern Finland. That location is not an accident: land availability, network capacity, low energy costs, and a cooler climate all make Finland unusually attractive for data-center operators.
Finland has been pitching itself as a Northern European compute hub for years, and the pitch is straightforward: cheaper cooling, cleaner power, and fewer headaches than in hotter markets. For Nebius, that makes the country a practical place to park a giant AI factory; for Finland, it is another trophy project that reinforces its claim to be a home for sovereign European data.
Nebius Finland data center will handle training and inference
The new center will be used for both training and inference, and Nebius says it will not be tied to a single customer. That flexibility matters: AI infrastructure is increasingly being sold as a utility, not a bespoke one-off, because cloud buyers want capacity that can swing between model training and day-to-day production workloads.
- Power capacity: 310 MW
- Estimated cost: $10 billion
- Location: Lappeenranta, Finland
- Construction partner: Polarnode
- Ramp-up: from 2027
Nebius is already thinking bigger
The Finland build also sits inside a much larger expansion plan. Nebius says it has 3 GW of capacity contracted by the end of this year, and it is also building a 240 MW data center near Lille in France. Its current biggest operating European site is in Mäntsälä, Finland, at 75 MW, which makes the new Lappeenranta project look less like an experiment and more like the next rung on a very expensive ladder.
The open question is whether the AI infrastructure boom keeps rewarding this kind of scale. For now, the answer from Microsoft, Meta, and everyone else buying compute is yes – and Nebius is building as if that answer will hold for a long while.