Nebius, formerly Yandex, will triple data center capacity in Finland

The Nebius company, formed from Yandex N.V., which develops data centers for artificial intelligence systems, announced an increase in data center capacity in the Finnish community of Mäntsälä. According to Datacenter Dynamics, the capacity of the expanding data center will triple.

This expansion will allow Nebius to increase the capacity of the data center from 25 to 75 MW, and the facility will accommodate more than 60 thousand accelerators. Back in July, the company announced an increase in the data center area – two sections have already been built, two more will be built, as previously planned.

By mid-2025, the company intends to invest more than $1 billion in AI infrastructure in Europe, including “custom” data centers for individual orders, and launched the first AI cluster in France based on NVIDIA H200 accelerators. In addition, last week the company hinted at the construction of data centers in the United States, and in Europe, Nebius has already signed two letters of intent to build two new data centers.

Image source: Miikka Luotio/unsplash.com

The Finland facility will use NVIDIA H200 compute accelerators, which NVIDIA customers should have access to starting November 2024. In this case, Nebius will be one of the first operators in Europe to present solutions based on this platform on the market.

The data center in Finland uses free air cooling and uses a heat transfer system to heat local residential premises. Today we are talking about the annual “recovery” of about 20 thousand MWh of energy. After expansion, the company’s capabilities will only increase. The design of the data center allows operation at low northern temperatures of up to 40 °C, thanks to which another 15% of energy is saved.

According to Nebius representative Andrey Korolenko, tripling the capacity was an important milestone towards building best-in-class AI infrastructure in Europe, demonstrating the capabilities of Nebius.

The Amsterdam-based piece left over from Yandex’s split retains the company’s Finnish data center and Nebius AI division, as well as data science company Toloka AI, education technology provider TripleTen and autonomous driving systems company Avdrive.

The data center in Mäntsälä was one of five Yandex data centers and today is the largest taxpayer of the local municipality.