Nebius drops $10 billion on a 310 MW AI factory in Finland
Nebius, the Dutch AI cloud company that used to be part of Yandex, announced today that it is building a 310-megawatt AI data center in Lappeenranta, Finland. The project carries a price tag north of $10 billion, making it one of the largest dedicated AI compute facilities in Europe.
The first capacity is expected to come online in 2027. The facility will host NVIDIA GPU clusters and serve as Nebius’s largest non-US site, designed for large-scale AI training and inference workloads. Lappeenranta sits near the Russian border in southeastern Finland, a location chosen for its access to cold climate (free cooling), available power, and proximity to Nordic energy grids.
This is not Nebius flexing for the sake of it. The company has a stated 2026 target of securing more than 3 gigawatts of contracted power across its global footprint. The Finland facility is a major step toward that goal. It follows the recent opening of Nebius’s first UK data center, also announced this month, and lands just two weeks after Meta signed a $27 billion five-year infrastructure deal with Nebius for dedicated AI compute capacity across multiple locations.
The Meta deal alone covers $12 billion of dedicated capacity. The Finland announcement signals that Nebius is not just fulfilling existing contracts but aggressively expanding its own capacity to court more customers. The neocloud market is heating up fast, with CoreWeave going public and Lambda Labs, Together AI, and others all competing for the same enterprise AI training budgets.
Nebius stock moved on the news, though the direction depended on who you asked. Some outlets reported a 4.5% gain on expansion momentum. Others noted an 8% drop as investors weighed the capital expenditure against broader concerns about AI spending sustainability. The truth is probably somewhere in between: the market likes growth stories but remains nervous about how much money is being poured into AI infrastructure without guaranteed returns.
The geopolitical angle is worth watching. Nebius was spun out of Yandex after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and restructured as a Dutch company to maintain access to Western technology and markets. Building its largest European facility in a Finnish city 30 kilometers from the Russian border is a statement in itself about where the company sees its future.
Europe has been racing to close the AI compute gap with the US. The EU’s AI Act creates regulatory pressure, but regulation without infrastructure is just theater. Projects like this one are what actually determine whether European companies and researchers can train frontier models domestically or remain dependent on US cloud providers.