French AI Startup Unveils 10bn-Euro Finland Data Centre Project

French startup Sesterce said on Thursday that it will invest more than 10 billion euros in an AI and data centre hub in Finland. The project will be built in the town of Jamsa, on the site of a former paper mill. According to the company's statement, it will "develop supercomputing and computing infrastructure for artificial intelligence."

Sesterce told AFP that work has already begun and that the "AI campus" is due to come online in 2027.

The announcement comes amid a wider wave of AI infrastructure spending in Finland. Last month Google announced a 13-billion-euro investment in digital infrastructure across the country over the next two years, to power its AI models.

The boom has also met resistance. On Tuesday, a Finnish authority ordered work to stop at two data centre sites after finding that the required environmental impact assessments had not been completed. The report does not say which sites were affected or whether they are linked to Sesterce.

One detail in the source is inconsistent: it converts the 10 billion euros to "$11.1 million", which is clearly a typo, since the figure would be in the billions of dollars. The report does not give a corrected dollar amount.

The project matters because it adds a large private commitment to Finland's growing role as a location for AI computing capacity, while the stop-work order shows that regulatory requirements, particularly environmental assessments, can halt construction on such sites.