In an interview with Swedish-language daily Vasabladet, Scale42 CEO William Tasney explained why his next major AI data centre is heading to coastal Ostrobothnia rather than the data centre belts of the United States.
Scale42 has reserved 235 hectares of land from the City of Kristinestad for the development of a hyperscale data centre development. The area sits at the heart of Finland’s wind-power production indusrty, with a 400 kV Fingrid substation serving as a major routing point for Western Finland.
Vasabladet reports that Scale42’s planned investment exceeds the €1 billion commitment TikTok publicly announced for its own Finnish data centre project, making it one of the largest privately backed digital infrastructure projects in the country.
"I would rather build here than in Texas." — William Tasney, CEO, Scale42
The rationale, in Tasney’s view, comes down to four factors:
- Wind-dominant electricity at some of the lowest wholesale prices in Europe
- Grid headroom — four 400 kV substations and adjacent solar zones in development
- Stakeholder alignment — a municipality that has spent years preparing land and zoning for industrial-scale digital infrastructure
An advance reservation agreement was signed in April 2026, with zoning and joint customer development now progressing alongside the City of Kristinestad.
For Scale42, Kristinestad anchors the company’s Finnish footprint alongside its portfolio of projects across the Noridcs, a portfolio targeting low-cost, low-carbon AI compute at industrial scale on land that already has the power and connectivity to support it.