Nebius has laid out plans for a major new AI facility in Finland, a project the company says will rank among Europe’s biggest dedicated AI compute sites once fully built.
The new campus, to be located in Lappeenranta, is designed for up to 310 megawatts of capacity, with the first customer capacity expected to come online in 2027.
CNBC described the move as part of a wider European rush to add AI infrastructure, while Nebius itself said the project supports its goal of securing more than 3 gigawatts of contracted power by the end of 2026.
A bigger Finland bet from Nebius
In its official announcement, Nebius said the Lappeenranta project follows the earlier expansion of its Mäntsälä data center in Finland to 75 MW and will become one of Europe’s largest dedicated AI factories when fully deployed.
Founder and CEO Arkady Volozh said the new site would be a significant addition to the company’s global AI infrastructure build-out and would make a significant contribution to its capacity goals.
Nebius also said it already has more than 750 MW of contracted power across owned sites and colocations in Europe, the Middle East and Africa, including a separate 240 MW AI factory project near Lille, France.
Why Europe’s compute race matters here
The timing is part of the story. The Let’s Data Science report said the Finland project was announced amid a broader wave of AI infrastructure investments across Europe, underscoring rising demand for large-scale compute. Nebius echoed that broader market pressure in its own release, saying global demand for high-performance compute for AI training and inference continues to accelerate.
Put simply, this is not just a real-estate expansion. It is part of a regional fight to secure enough power, land, cooling, and hardware to support next-generation AI workloads.
What Nebius says the site will do
Nebius said the Lappeenranta factory will serve AI builders using the latest NVIDIA Blackwell and Rubin generations of accelerated compute. The company added that its Mäntsälä site already houses Europe’s first operational deployment of the NVIDIA GB300 NVL72 platform, and that it intends to offer the NVIDIA Vera Rubin NVL72 platform later this year.
That makes the Finland expansion notable not only for size, but also for the type of AI workloads Nebius is targeting: large-scale training and inference for developers and enterprises that need dense GPU infrastructure.
Jobs, energy and local impact
Nebius said the Lappeenranta campus will sit on an industrial site of about 100 acres and is expected to create up to 700 skilled construction jobs, mostly sourced in the local area, along with around 100 permanent positions once the facility is operational. Tuomo Sallinen, mayor of Lappeenranta, said the project would help place the city at the forefront of Finland’s AI ecosystem and meet Europe’s growing AI demand for decades to come.
The company also said the site will use a closed-loop liquid cooling system to keep water consumption low and is being designed so excess server heat can potentially be fed into the local district heating network.
In Mäntsälä, Nebius said a similar setup avoided roughly 4,000 tonnes of CO2e emissions tied to heat production in 2025 and lowered heating costs for connected households by around 10%.
The bigger signal for Europe
What Nebius is building in Finland is more than another data center announcement. It is a sign that Europe’s AI conversation is shifting from model launches to physical infrastructure: power contracts, cooling systems, deployment timelines, and who gets access to scarce compute.
With first customer supply targeted for 2027 and capacity planned at 310 MW, the Lappeenranta project gives Nebius a larger foothold in a region that increasingly sees AI capacity as a strategic asset, not just a cloud service.
