Microsoft reportedly linked to Pure DC's €7.5bn Finland campus, one of Europe's largest AI data centre projects
British Pure Data Centres Group has broken ground on a 550-megawatt AI campus in Seinäjoki, western Finland, in a €7.5bn project reportedly backed by Microsoft as an early tenant — though neither company has confirmed the deal. The project is already one of the largest AI infrastructure investments in Europe.
Text by Martti Asikainen, 15.7.2026 | Photo by Adobe Stock Photos
Pure Data Centres Group (Pure DC), a London-headquartered data centre developer, has launched the first phase of a planned 550-megawatt (MW) artificial intelligence data centre campus in Seinäjoki, Finland. The city’s administration has called it one of Finland’s largest-ever inward investment projects..
The first phase represents an investment of more than €1.5 billion and will deliver 110MW of capacity. The site, designated SJK01, is capable of scaling to a full €7.5 billion, 550MW-plus campus, subject to further permissions and contracts being secured. Phase 1 is already fully leased, the company said, with the substation for the first data hall built and operational, and all planning permissions and power requirements in place.
Bloomberg reported, citing people familiar with the matter, that Microsoft is among the customers leasing capacity at the site. Bloomberg’s report, said it had approached both Pure DC and Microsoft for comment; neither company has named a tenant in its own public statements about the launch.
Scale and design
The full campus is planned across roughly 370 acres (about 150 hectares) and is designed around repeatable 40MW “AI-ready” modules built with direct liquid cooling, intended to handle the high thermal loads of modern AI hardware. According to Pure DC, the site has access to more than 700 megavolt-amperes of renewable power, which it expects will keep energy costs low and supply stable.
The project has been in development for more than a year. Pure DC bought an initial 22.3-hectare plot in the city’s Kivenneva area in April for €3.86 million, at a point when the site was still planned at 500MW; the company has since raised that target to 550MW and lifted total planned investment to €7.5 billion.
The first phase alone is expected to bring more than 1,500 construction jobs to the region, according to Seinäjoki’s city administration, with the full build-out supporting over 3,000 jobs across an estimated ten-year construction period, delivered with local partner SDC Ventures.
Jaakko Kiiskilä, mayor of Seinäjoki Municipality, said the partnership with Pure DC had been built up over the past two years and would bring “major employment to the Seinäjoki area for years to come, and across many skills and trades.” He added that business rates and property tax generated by the site would be reinvested locally.
Pure DC said it is developing a skills pipeline with Seinäjoki University of Applied Sciences and local vocational institutions, aimed at training workers in a region whose economy has historically centred on forestry and paper milling. Waste heat from the campus is intended to be fed into the city’s district heating network.
Part of a wider Finnish push
The Seinäjoki project sits alongside a broader expansion of AI computing infrastructure in Finland, which already hosts the LUMI supercomputer in Kajaani, one of Europe’s most powerful, and is building an AI-focused successor system that Finnish officials say should be ready for researchers and companies within the next year. Microsoft separately agreed in June to acquire around 190 hectares of land in Vaasa and Mustasaari, also on Finland’s west coast, for a further data centre project of its own.
Gary Wojtaszek, Pure DC’s executive chairman and interim chief executive, said countries that build AI infrastructure over the coming decade would help shape “the global economy for the next fifty years,” pointing to Finland’s engineering talent, renewable energy supply and technology heritage as reasons for the investment. He also framed the project as part of a wider push to establish an AI ecosystem in the region, extending beyond the data centre itself to supply chains and local start-ups.
Pure DC, owned by investment firm Oaktree Capital Management since the company’s founding in 2013, secured $2.7 billion in financing in May, much of it raised against its existing Dublin and Amsterdam campuses rather than the Finnish site itself. Oaktree has separately been reported to be seeking a minority investor for the wider Pure DC platform, a sign that financing a global pipeline of more than 1GW of capacity — spanning sites in the UK, UAE, Saudi Arabia, Spain, Indonesia, Ireland, the Netherlands and Finland — still depends heavily on outside capital. How the later phases of the Seinäjoki campus, beyond the fully leased first stage, will be funded and let has not yet been detailed.
