Magnora's Estonian bet: half a campus, all of the power position

Magnora Data Center has agreed to take half of an Estonian data center campus in a deal that is mostly a power position, striking terms with Sunly AS, an Estonian energy infrastructure firm, for 50 percent of the Risti Kampus project in western Estonia, 60km south of Tallinn, with a first phase that could total 180MW and a campus eventually reaching 400MW. Magnora also holds an option to lift its interest to 75 percent, though terms were not shared.

The undisclosed price matters less than the structure wrapped around it: powered land beside a generation park Sunly is developing—244MWp of solar, 144MW of battery storage and 44MW of wind—and the right to decide later how much of the project Magnora wants to own. A 50 percent position plus a call on another 25 points reads as an option on capacity rather than an obligation to fill it, letting the developer scale into the site only if demand justifies it, though the coverage does not say how the option is priced or when it lapses.

For Sunly, the transaction supplies a customer for electrons the company is already committed to produce: founded in 2019, Sunly has 1GW of renewable capacity operating or under construction, and its investors include Mirova, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners, KLP, Vardar, the European Investment Bank, mBank and Rivage Investments—a register that reads as infrastructure capital. Chief executive Priit Lepasepp frames Risti as Sunly's strategy gathered in one place, with a data center as the large consumer that binds solar, battery storage and a planned wind park into a single system; in his telling, the adjacent solar park will soon be the largest in the Baltics.

Magnora arrives from the other direction: founded in 2001, it converted into a dedicated renewable energy investor in 2018, took its data center arm public earlier this year, and now runs one live facility in Norway with others in development across Norway, Finland and Italy. Estonia is the second Nordic campus in that pipeline to be defined by its connection rather than its server capacity; at Hämeenlinna in Finland, as this publication has argued, the scarce asset is a firm grid connection, and the Estonian project is being sold on the same premise.

Nothing disclosed here names a tenant, an offtake agreement or a price, which is how power-linked projects now arrive: the announcement is a land and interconnection event, and merchant risk stays with the developer until a counterparty signs. Magnora's version carries a hedge its peers rarely get, because the generation next door belongs to its partner and the option to go to 75 percent can be exercised after the site proves it can energize. The wager is that in the Baltic buildout the queue position, not the server hall, is the part that appreciates—and it is the right way to hold that exposure. The test is phase one, where 180MW still has no named customer.