Finland Calling – The data center industry is beginning to scale in Finland with several projects planned across the country that could add up to several gigawatts of power capacity, according a long read in Data Center Dynamics.
The cool climate, abundant land and cheap green energy of the Nordics have long appealed to data center developers, though other factors have sent the bulk of existing and planned construction to Norway and Sweden rather than Finland.
What changed?
“It is getting harder and harder to meet AI demand in other places, driving it to places where you can have capacity, and Finland has popped up as a place where you can have large-scale sites with fairly quick timelines,” Aleksi Taipale, co-founder and CEO of Finnish developer Hypercos, told DCD.
Among a long list of developers looking to Finland, Oaktree Capital Management-funded Pure Data Centers Group has launched the first phase of a planned 550 MW AI data center with all 110 MW leased to clients including Microsoft, according to reporting in The Tech Capital.
Even the Finnish company Nokia, known for its 1990s-era candy-bar-shaped cellphones, is getting in on the AI boom, reports The Wall Street Journal.
Nokia pivoted away from cellphones to “equipment and software that acts as a kind of logistics and delivery service for AI, including switches that connect servers and routers that direct data traffic between servers,” the journal reports. “If a data center’s thousands of miles of fiber cables are the roads that the data travels, then Nokia’s products are the trucks and sorting centers that get the data where it needs to go.”
News Bytes
Brazil Bound: Abundant green energy is among the reasons the global AI infrastructure boom is beginning to pop in Brazil, according to a report in Inc. ByteDance, the owner of TikTok, is set to spend $39 billion on a data center in Ceará that will run on wind power. Elea Data Center’s Rio AI City project, which could scale to 3.5 GW, will run on 100% renewable energy, notes Deezen. Power grid limitations are the biggest obstacle to global data center and AI investment across Latin America, according to market intelligence firm BNamericas. In Brazil, the constraint is in delivering power transmission to the corridors where data center capacity is clustering.
Little Engines: Data center developers are turning to fleets of small engines typically used to power cars and cruise ships to bypass lengthy wait times to connect to the power grid, according to The Wall Street Journal. Lead times for reciprocating engines are about a year, compared to three years or more for natural gas turbines. This comes as good news for engine manufacturers including Innio, which made its public market debut in June and has 8.3 GW worth of data center projects on the books. The two other leading engine manufacturers in the data center space are Rolls Royce and Caterpillar, each with more than 3 GW of engines linked to announced data center projects.
Labor Shortage: There’s more work to be done than there are workers to do it is a long simmering lament in the digital infrastructure industry. The effects of this labor shortage are beginning to limit the growth of the firms who provide craft laborers to data center developers, according to reporting in Bloomberg. Blockbuster revenue growth for these firms is expected to moderate, a shift that reflects how a tight labor market, rather than any cooling in demand, is constraining expansion, noted Scott Levine, a Bloomberg Intelligence analyst.
One Cool Thing
Curb Appeal: A push to give data centers greater curb appeal is gathering momentum as part of a multipronged strategy to overcome increased community pushback.
Reporting on the trend began to surface in earnest this January with a piece in Semafor that featured projects by the design firm Gensler including a data center in the Netherlands with vertical gardens and a planned Wonder Valley project in Canada with a wood exterior that blends in with the forested surroundings.
Aesthetics may matter more as AI inference data centers are sited in dense urban environments for low latency interaction with users, Data Center Knowledge noted this June.
The shift to more urban data centers could prompt companies to “ensure the building is a proper reflection of their corporate statement, commitment to sustainability, and the environment,” Peter Skae, managing director of technical services at JLL, told Data Center Knowledge.
A data center is “no different than any other building and it doesn’t deserve to look any worse than any other building,” Geoffrey Diamond, design director at Gensler, told The Wall Street Journal for a July 12 story about the trend.
Top image: The first phase of Pure Data Center Group’s planned 550 MW project in Seinäjoki, Finland is under construction. Photo courtesy of Pure Data Center Group.