Construction company SRV and Finland-based CSC – IT Center for Science have signed an agreement for the development phase of the Lumi ‘AI Factory’ – a data center set to house an extension of the Lumi supercomputer, optimized for AI workloads.

Construction is slated to commence at the beginning of 2026, with the data center expected to be operational by spring 2027. The facility will be located in the Renforsin Ranta business park area of Kajaani, Finland, where the current Lumi supercomputer, operated by CSC, is already located.

The development phase of the project will see SRV draw up technical, implementation, and project plans, with the aim of determining the project’s investment potential by the end of the year.

In a statement, SRV said the data center would be implemented as a cooperative project management contract, and in order to move ahead, would require a separate investment decision from CSC.

"We are excited to start collaborating with CSC to develop the new AI factory project with a modern two-stage project management model,” said SRV's unit director Jarkko Salmenoja.

"Together with the client, we aim to find the most suitable solutions for the project during the development phase to meet the goals set by the client in terms of costs, schedule, and quality.

"We bring our strong expertise in the implementation of similar technically demanding facilities to the project. In the past, we have built the Helsinki Data Center for Telia, as well as similar projects in the manufacturing industry that are challenging in terms of building technology, such as Okmetic's silicon wafer factory.”

Kimmo Koski, managing director of CSC, added: "Lumi AI Factory supports not only top-level research and innovations, but also sustainable growth and cooperation. It creates completely new opportunities for AI development. It is important that we can now start the development phase together with SRV. The AI factory is a very significant project in Finland and Europe.”

Launched in 2022, the €202m ($211 million) Lumi supercomputer is a 379.7 petaflops system co-funded by the EU-backed European High-Performance Computing Joint Undertaking (EuroHPC JU) initiative. It ranked ninth on the latest edition of the Top500 list.

The HPE Cray EX235a system features 2,978 AMD Epyc Trento CPUs, 11,912 AMD MI250X GPUs, and another 2,048 dual-socket AMD CPUs in a separate partition. DCD visited Lumi earlier this year, where the team is competing for Europe's new AI supercomputer efforts.