Finnish cloud and colocation provider Ficolo, private equity group Taaleri and real estate investment company Pontos are planning to spend €50m ($59.5m) on a data center in the center of Helsinki.

With a planned maximum capacity of 10MW, the facility will offer wholesale space for content and service providers, cloud providers and end users.

Piccolo Ficolo’s grand plan

Ficolo, which is now 80 percent owned by Taaleri and Pontos, already has a data center in Ulvila, in the western part of the country, which will be expanded as part of the investment.

The 8,500 sq m (91,500 sq ft) facility is built inside mines quarried by the Finnish Defence Forces in the 1960s, and is split into nine tunnel halls.

Pontos CEO Timo Kokkila said: “the new data center will be built on Ficolo’s strong expertise and tried and tested service concept. The acquisition of Ficolo is the start of a larger project where we build data center capacity in the Helsinki Metropolitan Area. Our aim is to be a significant data center for Finnish and international customers. We will facilitate modern server room space and competitive server capacity for service operators. ”

According to Taaleri CEO Juhani Elomaa, heat discharged by the Helsinki data center will be used for energy production. Construction on the facility is planned for early 2018.