The Finnish satellite company, valued at more than €10bn, becomes the first backing for a European Commission-backed fund set up to keep promising tech firms from being bought out or relocated abroad.
A decade ago, the Dead Internet Theory was a fringe conspiracy theory confined to the darker corners of the web. Now traffic figures, content-production statistics and AI research all point in the same direction. Bots are producing an ever-larger share of the web’s traffic and content, while human-written text is gradually becoming a scarce resource. The question is no longer whether the internet is changing, but what will be left of it.
The European Commission has opened bidding for seven large-scale AI computing facilities, backed by €10bn ($11.4bn) in public funding, as the bloc tries to close a widening gap with the United States and China in artificial intelligence.
Helsinki data platform Aiven has acquired Finnish startup Flow AI, bringing its tools for running AI agents reliably on live business data into Aiven’s open-source platform. Financial terms were not disclosed.
The unit, named the Quantum and AI Research Centre, builds on years of prior AI and quantum research at the Finnish financial group and is expected to grow to around 60 specialists by mid-2027.
Finland’s top civil servant on public finances says AI will effectively replace public sector staff by 2031. An AI researcher who studies the technology’s use in Finnish organisations says that framing starts from the wrong question entirely.
NIB’s own press release describes a standalone €22 million loan to Verda Cloud Oy. Verda’s own press release, issued the same day, describes NIB as one of five banks whose participation extended its funding round from €100 million to €136 million. The two accounts are reported here as published, without combining their figure.
The Finnish telecoms equipment maker raised its full-year profit guidance after AI and cloud customer sales surged, even as memory chip shortages pushed up costs across the industry and restructuring charges pulled reported profit into a loss.
AI could improve public services and help Finland respond to labour shortages and pressure on public finances. But replacing employees should not become the goal before the country defines the public value it expects AI to create.
The companies say telecoms operators will be able to carry significantly more data over existing spectrum using AI processing in the radio network, though the headline efficiency gains remain projections rather than proven results.
