Nebius Announces $10 Billion, 310 MW AI Data Center in Finland — One of Europe Largest, Backed by Meta Multi-Billion Agreement

On March 31, 2026, Nebius Group, the Netherlands-based AI cloud company spun out of Yandex, announced the construction of a massive new AI data center (which Nebius calls an AI factory) in the Finnish city of Lappeenranta with capacity of up to 310 MW. The facility is estimated to be worth more than $10 billion and will be one of Europe largest AI infrastructure projects.

Key Details:

• Location: Lappeenranta, Finland (chosen for clean energy access and EU data sovereignty)
• Capacity: Up to 310 MW of AI compute capacity
• Estimated Value: Over $10 billion
• Purpose: AI training and inference workloads for hyperscaler and enterprise customers
• Timeline: Construction starting immediately, with phased capacity delivery

Meta Partnership: The announcement follows Nebius securing a multi-billion dollar agreement with Meta for AI compute capacity. This confirms that even the largest tech companies are looking beyond their own data centers to external AI cloud providers to meet surging demand for AI training infrastructure.

Funding Context: Nebius has raised over $10.35 billion in recent months, including a $2 billion investment from NVIDIA and backing from Accel. This Finnish facility adds to Nebius existing European infrastructure and positions the company as Europe answer to the US-dominated AI cloud market.

European AI Infrastructure Race: The Nebius announcement comes amid intense competition to build AI compute capacity in Europe:

• European governments are pushing for AI sovereignty to reduce dependence on US cloud providers
• Finland offers clean energy (hydroelectric and nuclear) critical for sustainable AI operations
• EU data regulations make European-based AI infrastructure attractive for enterprise customers needing data residency compliance

Market Impact: Nebius stock gained 4.5% on the announcement. The company positions itself as a neocloud — a new category of cloud provider purpose-built for AI workloads rather than retrofitting traditional cloud infrastructure. This contrasts with AWS, Azure, and GCP which bolt AI capabilities onto existing multi-purpose cloud platforms.

Significance for AI Agent Infrastructure: As AI agents become persistent services requiring 24/7 compute, the demand for dedicated AI infrastructure grows exponentially. Agent workloads are particularly compute-intensive when running reasoning models (like Claude, GPT-o-series) and maintaining long-running sessions. Nebius European presence means enterprises can run AI agents on EU-sovereign infrastructure with full GDPR compliance — a critical requirement for European enterprise agent deployment.