French AI infrastructure company Sesterce plans to invest more than €10 billion in a new computing campus in central Finland, transforming a former paper-mill site into one of Europe’s largest proposed AI infrastructure projects.
Sesterce said the planned campus in Jämsä, on the former Kaipola paper mill site, will begin with a 200-megawatt first phase and an investment exceeding €10 billion.
Reuters separately reported that the project is worth roughly $11 billion and is part of a growing wave of technology investment into Finland.
A paper mill site is being turned into AI infrastructure
The location is significant.
Rather than developing an entirely new industrial site, Sesterce is proposing to reuse infrastructure at Kaipola, where a paper mill previously operated.
The company says the campus will provide supercomputing and computing infrastructure for artificial intelligence and will rely on renewable energy. Construction is expected to employ around 2,000 people, with approximately 300 permanent jobs once the facility is fully operational.
Finnish broadcaster Yle reported that Sesterce CEO Youssef El Manssouri said the investment decision had already been made and a contract signed with the future customer, although the client has not been identified publicly.
Yle also noted that the project would be only around €3 billion smaller than Google’s recently announced €13 billion investment across several Finnish locations.
Finland is becoming attractive to data-center builders
The project highlights why Nordic countries are drawing increasing attention from AI infrastructure developers.
Large-scale AI computing requires electricity, cooling and suitable land, and those constraints can become more important than proximity to traditional software hubs.
Finland offers relatively cool temperatures, existing industrial sites and access to low-carbon electricity—conditions that can make very large computing facilities easier to operate.
Sesterce itself is developing multiple campuses, including a planned 1GW AI compute site in Bosquel, France, with SoftBank Group.
The Finnish project therefore fits a broader strategy rather than standing alone.
AI competition is becoming an energy competition
The size of the investment shows how far AI infrastructure has moved from the economics of traditional software startups.
A model company may hire researchers and rent compute. An AI infrastructure provider must secure electricity, land, construction capacity, cooling systems, networking and expensive accelerators—often years before full revenue arrives.
That makes energy geography increasingly central to European AI strategy.
Countries capable of offering large amounts of reliable power may capture investment even if they are not traditionally viewed as major software centers.
For founders and investors, that changes the map of Europe’s AI ecosystem.
Paris, London and Berlin may remain important for talent and capital, but the physical layer of AI may increasingly emerge in places where power, industrial land and cooling capacity are available at scale.
Sesterce’s €10 billion Finland plan is therefore more than another data-center announcement.
It is another sign that Europe’s competition for AI leadership is moving underneath the software stack—into electricity, industrial infrastructure and the physical systems required to keep increasingly large models running.
