Credit: Sesterce French AI infrastructure company Sesterce plans to invest more than €10bn in an AI data centre campus at a former paper mill in Jämsä, central Finland. The campus will be located on the Kaipola site, where UPM shut down its paper mill in early 2021, Sesterce announced. Building work on the first phase, with 200 megawatts (MW) of capacity, is due to start this year. A second phase would raise that to 600MW.
Over time, Sesterce aims to build more than one gigawatt of AI capacity in Finland on existing industrial sites, in line with demand. “For more than six decades, the Kaipola mill produced paper for the world. Now, a new generation of industry is being planned for the site. Our goal is to preserve the area’s industrial identity while making use of existing infrastructure, including the power grid, water systems, buildings and logistics connections,” says Youssef El Manssouri, CEO of Sesterce. Sesterce expects to create around 2,000 jobs during construction and about 300 permanent jobs once the campus is operating.
The company said it plans to hire mostly Finnish contractors. Over the next ten years, it aims to add one megawatt of new renewable energy to the grid for every megawatt the campus uses. Sesterce will also set up a €10 million fund to support local projects. Kaipola Green Port owns the site, having purchased it from UPM in 2021.
Board chair Martti Inkovaara told Yle that negotiations to sell the entire site to Sesterce are well underway. Local officials have welcomed the plan, but they noted that permits are still required. “Jämsä needs new investments, business activity and jobs. The Sesterce project is an interesting opportunity to strengthen the vitality of the region, provided it progresses from plans to implementation and meets the applicable requirements,” says Jori Reijula, the Mayor of Jämsä. The project follows other large AI investments in Finland. Google said in September it would spend €13bn on AI infrastructure there in 2027 and 2028.
This week, however, a Finnish regulator ordered Google to stop clearing forest at two planned sites. Nebius is also building a second data centre in Mäntsälä. Finland is not Sesterce’s first large project. In June, the company and SoftBank Group agreed to develop a 1GW AI campus in Bosquel, northern France.
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