French AI startup Sesterce unveils €10 billion Finland data center project

French startup Sesterce said on Thursday, October 8, it would invest more than €10 billion in a major AI and data center hub in Finland. The project, to be built in the town of Jamsa on the site of a former paper mill, "will develop supercomputing and computing infrastructure for artificial intelligence," the company said in a statement.

Sesterce told Agence France-Presse that work had already begun and that the "AI campus" was due to come online in 2027. The first stage of the project will have a computing capacity of 200 megawatts, "expected to increase to 600MW in the second phase," it added, without specifying when the expansion would take place. Sesterce also said it had secured an anchor customer but declined to identify it.

The company is developing two other sites outside of Finland that will host supercomputers and data center infrastructure that other firms can rent to power AI applications. Finland has attracted a series of large foreign investments in data centers, which require huge amounts of electricity and cooling. The country offers a cool climate and relatively cheap, stable power supplies, much of them generated without fossil fuels. Sesterce said it hoped to develop more than one gigawatt of computing capacity in Finland, depending on market demand.

Last month Google announced a €13-billion investment in digital infrastructure across Finland over the next two years to power its AI models. But the boom has also faced pushback, with a Finnish authority on Tuesday ordering work to stop at two data center sites after finding that required environmental impact assessments had not been completed.