Nebius Is Dropping $10 Billion on a Massive AI Data Center in Finland

The AI infrastructure race just got a whole lot more real.

Nebius Group, the Amsterdam-based AI cloud company that rose from the ashes of Russian tech giant Yandex, announced last week that it's building a 310-megawatt AI data center in Lappeenranta, Finland. The price tag? More than $10 billion. That makes it one of the largest AI infrastructure projects Europe has ever seen.

And this isn't some far-off plan on a whiteboard. Finnish developer Polarnode is already building the facility on a 100-acre campus, with the first capacity expected to go live in 2027.

Why Finland?

The location choice tells you a lot about what matters in AI right now. Lappeenranta, a city in southeastern Finland near the Russian border, checks every box for running power-hungry AI workloads. Finland offers low energy prices, a strong supply of renewable electricity, and a cold climate that naturally helps cool massive server farms. That last part matters more than you'd think. Cooling is one of the biggest cost drivers in data center operations, and a Nordic location cuts those expenses considerably.

There's also the data sovereignty angle. Europe has been pushing hard to keep AI compute on European soil, and Polarnode CEO Mikko Toivanen said this project directly supports that goal. For companies and governments that want their data trained and processed within Europe, facilities like this become very attractive.

The Bigger Picture

Here's where the story gets really interesting. Nebius isn't just building data centers for the fun of it. The company has recently locked in supply contracts worth more than $40 billion with Microsoft and Meta, two of the biggest AI spenders on the planet. That kind of committed demand means this isn't a speculative bet. It's capacity being built against real, contracted revenue.

The Finland site will be Nebius' largest outside the United States, surpassing a 240-megawatt project it announced near Lille, France earlier this year. The company already operates a 75 MW facility in Mantsala, Finland, so it clearly knows the region well.

CEO Arkady Volozh said Lappeenranta will make a major contribution toward the company's goal of securing more than 3 gigawatts of contracted capacity by the end of 2026. To put that in perspective, this single site would use enough electricity to power roughly half a million Finnish households and would cover about 10 percent of Nebius' total planned capacity.

A Wild Origin Story

If you haven't been following Nebius, the backstory is worth knowing. The company is what's left of Yandex, the so-called "Google of Russia," after it went through one of the most dramatic corporate breakups in tech history. After Russia's invasion of Ukraine, Yandex N.V. sold off all its Russian assets for $5.4 billion in 2024, kept around 1,300 engineers, rebranded as Nebius, and started building an AI infrastructure business from the ground up.

The company returned to trading on Nasdaq in October 2024 and hasn't slowed down since. Nvidia jumped in with a $700 million investment, and Nebius reported revenue of roughly $530 million for 2025, a nearly fivefold increase year over year. The growth trajectory has been steep, and the Finland project only adds to it.

Why This Matters

This story isn't just about one company building one data center. It signals where the AI industry is heading.

The AI boom is no longer just about better models and smarter chatbots. It's now being expressed through massive infrastructure bets, energy planning, and regional competition for compute capacity. Europe in particular is racing to build enough AI infrastructure to avoid total dependence on U.S.-based clouds, and projects like this one sit right at the center of that push.

For businesses watching the AI space, the takeaway is clear. The companies making the biggest moves right now aren't just the ones building AI models. They're the ones building the physical backbone that every AI model needs to run. And with $40 billion in contracts from Microsoft and Meta already in hand, Nebius is positioning itself as one of the key players in that race.

Worth keeping an eye on.