Nebius Plans 310 MW AI Data Center in Finland

Nebius (NASDAQ: NBIS) is expanding its Nordic footprint with plans to build a 310-megawatt AI data center campus in Lappeenranta, Finland, in a move that deepens the European infrastructure race to secure power and land for AI workloads.

The Amsterdam-based AI cloud company said Tuesday the first capacity from the new site is expected to come online in 2027, making it one of Europe’s largest dedicated AI facilities once fully built. The project follows Nebius’s earlier expansion in Mäntsälä, where it recently completed a build-out to 75 MW. The company said it has already secured more than 750 MW of contracted power across owned sites and colocation facilities in Europe, the Middle East and Africa, including a 240-MW project near Lille, France. 

The new Finnish campus comes as Nebius accelerates a global buildout aimed at locking in more than 3 gigawatts of contracted power by the end of 2026, up from a prior target of more than 2.5 GW. The company said in its February shareholder letter that it had already passed 2 GW of contracted power and remained on track for 800 MW to 1 GW of connected power by the end of this year. Earlier this month, Nebius also won approval for a 1.2-GW AI factory in Independence, Missouri, its largest planned U.S. site to date. 

The Finland expansion underscores how AI infrastructure developers are increasingly gravitating toward markets that offer low-carbon electricity, cooler climates and district heating systems that can absorb waste heat. Nebius said the Lappeenranta site will use closed-loop liquid cooling to minimize water use and could eventually feed excess heat into the local district heating network, mirroring an arrangement at Mäntsälä that the company said avoided about 4,000 metric tons of carbon-dioxide-equivalent emissions in 2025 and cut heating costs for connected households by roughly 10%. 

Nebius has emerged as one of Europe’s most aggressive AI infrastructure builders since separating from Yandex’s Russian assets and resuming Nasdaq trading last year. The company has moved quickly to pair its capacity expansion with large customer commitments: Nebius announced in mid-March that it signed AI infrastructure agreements with Meta worth up to $27 billion over five years, and a week later said it had closed a $4.34 billion convertible debt raise to help fund capital spending plans of $16 billion to $20 billion through 2026. 

Nebius said the Lappeenranta campus will be built on an industrial site of about 100 acres and is expected to create as many as 700 construction jobs, with around 100 permanent roles once operational. The company also said it plans to explore training partnerships with local academic institutions through its Nebius Academy program as it seeks to build out a regional talent pipeline.