Winda Energy, a Helsinki-based renewable energy firm, is partnering with Czech investment firm Gi21 Capital to develop a 100-megawatt data center campus in Janakkala, Finland. The investment is estimated at over €500 million. Construction is scheduled to begin in 2027, with the facility targeting completion in 2028. The project sits in the Rastikangas industrial zone in the Kanta-Häme region, and it represents a direct bet that Finland's energy and climate economics create a durable cost advantage for high-density AI infrastructure that justifies the geographic distance from Northern European population centers.
The energy case is straightforward. Finland's wind power buildout over the past decade has increased renewable generating capacity to the point where wholesale electricity prices are among the lowest on the continent. Data centers running at 100 megawatts with 24-hour continuous AI workload profiles are extremely sensitive to electricity price per kilowatt-hour. A one cent per kilowatt-hour difference in wholesale electricity cost translates to approximately $8.7 million in annual operating cost at that scale. Finland's wind surplus, particularly during high-generation winter periods, regularly produces spot prices below what natural gas and nuclear baseload capacity can achieve in Central European markets.
The cooling economics are where Scandinavia's latitude becomes a direct operational advantage. Free cooling, using outside air to pre-cool or directly cool facility airstreams, works when ambient air temperature is below the server inlet temperature setpoint, typically 27 degrees Celsius or lower. In Finland, outdoor air temperatures are below 10 degrees Celsius for roughly 7 to 8 months of the year. For air-cooled facilities, that means the mechanical refrigeration plant runs at low load or is bypassed entirely for most of the year. For liquid-cooled facilities, outdoor air-to-water economizers or dry coolers can reject heat from CDU return lines without compressor energy input during those same months. The cooling energy draw at a Finnish facility running liquid-cooled AI workloads is substantially lower than an equivalent facility in Virginia, Texas, or Singapore over an annual cycle.
Finland has also established a heat reuse pattern that turns the data center's waste heat into district heating infrastructure. Fortum estimates that waste heat from large data center deployments can meet 2 to 3% of Finland's emission reduction targets while providing heating to tens of thousands of residential customers. For a 100-megawatt facility, the waste heat volume is considerable: a facility running at PUE 1.2 generates 20 megawatts of reject heat, which is a meaningful district heating input for a mid-sized Finnish municipality. The Janakkala project has not yet confirmed a district heating offtake arrangement, but the precedent set by existing Finnish data center heat reuse projects creates the regulatory and commercial framework for it.
Finland's government has proposed moving electricity consumed by data centers from the lower tax category to the general higher rate, adding approximately 2.19 cents per kilowatt-hour to operating costs from July 2026. A new incentive scheme is being developed in parallel, expected to take effect in autumn 2026, though the precise conditions remain undetermined. This policy uncertainty is the primary risk variable in the Finnish data center investment case. At 100 megawatts and continuous operation, a 2.19 cent per kilowatt-hour additional cost adds roughly $19 million annually in operating expense. The competitiveness of the Finnish location depends on what the incentive scheme offsets. Winda and Gi21 are betting the incentive structure ends up neutral to positive. Given the scale of investment flowing toward Nordic data center capacity, that bet is not unreasonable, but operators evaluating Finland as a location should track the incentive framework closely through the second half of 2026.