atNorth plans €2 billion Salo data center with 75MW first phase

atNorth plans to spend €2 billion ($2.24 billion) on a data center in Salo, roughly 115km west of Helsinki and 52km east of Turku, a 28.6-hectare site due online in the third quarter of 2028 and designated FIN05. Power for the first 75MW phase has been secured, and the grid-connected campus carries a pathway to 230MW, of which 160MW would be IT capacity.

The sequencing is the substance of the announcement. Power first, plant later: in a market where land and chips were once the binding inputs, atNorth has secured the electrons and left the building, the tenants and the energy contracts for later. Only the opening 75MW is described as secured, which reads as delivered capacity, while the remaining 155MW of the grid pathway reads as queued. The company says it aims to enter long-term power purchase agreements with local energy suppliers, and that the campus's waste heat will be made available for reuse. Chief executive Eyjólfur Magnús Kristinsson said atNorth is exploring how local energy partnerships, flexibility solutions and heat reuse can contribute to the wider energy system, while Salo's mayor, Anna-Kristiina Korhonen, made the local case in employment terms, citing jobs during construction and operations.

The company doing the building has changed hands twice in five years: assembled in 2012 as Advania Data Centers from three Nordic IT businesses — Iceland's Skyrr, Sweden's Kerfi, whose lineage runs back to a Nokia spin-off called Datapoint, and Norway's Hands — it de-merged from the Advania Group in 2017, took its current name, and was bought by Partners Group in 2021. Data Center Dynamics reports that Equinix and CPP acquired the company earlier this year; the coverage does not say what was paid, and the FIN05 announcement does not say how the €2 billion will be funded or who carries the construction risk.

atNorth operates seven data centers across Sweden, Iceland and Finland, with additional sites under development in Finland, Denmark, Sweden and Norway; two of the operating facilities sit near Helsinki. On the development side, Kouvola's FIN04, at 60MW with a pathway to 430MW, is the bigger Finnish bet, which suggests atNorth is accumulating grid positions in Finland rather than building toward a single flagship.

The €2 billion is described as an investment in the project rather than in its first phase, leaving the tranching unclear, while the money is being committed against capacity with no customer attached in public. Measured against the full 230MW of grid connection, that works out to roughly €8.7 million per eventual megawatt, and against the 160MW that would carry IT load, about €12.5 million. Those are our calculations from atNorth's own figures, and they cover land, connection, shell and cooling — inputs, not returns.

Finland has become the test bed for the parts of the data center business that sit outside the shell, as the Helsinki heat-reuse agreement between OnZero and the utility Helen prices data center waste heat as a utility product, giving merchant capacity something closer to a contracted revenue line. atNorth's Salo commitment reaches for the same idea a step earlier in the process, and the difference is the contract: a heat offtake with a named utility and a published price is an underwritable revenue stream, while a stated willingness to make heat available is a position to negotiate from.

Our August reporting argued that the AI buildout's bottleneck had shifted from land and chips to electrons, and that developers were becoming power owners rather than grid tenants. Salo is that argument at the contracting stage. It also runs into a related position on energy announcements that name no counterparty: with no PPA counterparty, tenor or price disclosed, the merchant risk in Salo sits on atNorth's balance sheet for now rather than on a supplier's.

The announcement names no anchor tenant, no signed lease and no buyer for the heat, which is unremarkable for a campus whose first phase is nearly two years from energization and is also the variable that decides which side of the capital hierarchy Salo lands on. The capital stack now prices anchor tenants rather than buildings, and tenantless development is underwritten as a different asset class. If Data Center Dynamics' account of the Equinix and CPP acquisition holds, Salo is a build inside a controlled platform rather than a standalone merchant project, though the announcement is framed as atNorth's own and says nothing about who holds the development risk.

Two contracts will decide how the €2 billion reads. The first is the power purchase agreement: who signs it, for how long, and whether the counterparty is a named generator rather than an unnamed supplier, since a long-dated contract is what turns a 230MW grid pathway into something a lender can size. The second is the heat, and Helen and OnZero showed in Helsinki that waste heat can carry a price, leaving atNorth until the third quarter of 2028, when FIN05 is due to go live, to show whether Salo's does.