The GPU-based artificial intelligence (AI) cloud provider will deploy a GPU cluster with more than 1MW of on-premises computing capacity. Gcore chose the Telia facility for its sustainability and safety standards, according to Dmitriy Gusakovskiy, who said: “We were impressed by the high safety standards and the fact that the facilities are powered exclusively by renewable energy sources (hydro, wind and solar) and that the excess heat is reused to heat thousands of apartments in the Helsinki area.”
Gusakovskiy added that with Telia they were able to commission the cluster within a month of signing the contract. The companies use a flexible pricing model based on kilowatts consumed. Michael Holm, head of global data center business at Telia, said that the reuse of excess heat means Finland has a “competitive energy tax rate in the EU.”
Holm added that “the Helsinki data center offers expansion and development options for Gcore’s future needs. The modular design of the data center ensures scalability, agility and adaptability to meet the needs of the most demanding customers.”
Telia’s Helsinki data center opened in 2018 with a capacity of 24 MW. The co-location site spans 34,000 square metres (365,970 square feet), although in May 2024 Telia revealed it was adding 4 MW of capacity to the facility, with construction expected to be completed in early 2025.
Telia previously told DCD that the site could eventually grow to support up to 100 MW of IT load. In addition to transferring waste heat to the district heating network and distributing it to “thousands” of homes and properties in Helsinki, the site’s UPS systems are connected to the Finnish grid to provide capacity when needed.
Gcore is a leading AI cloud provider. In July of this year, the company raised $60 million in a Series A funding round.
In April 2024, the Luxembourg-based company expanded into South Korea with NHN Cloud, with an initial 320 Nvidia H100 GPUs stacked across 40 servers. Each server also has 2 terabytes of data storage and 112 CPU cores, with a bandwidth of 3.2 Tbps.
The company has launched similar clusters in Luxembourg and Wales in 2023. In 2024, Gcore also launched a serverless Edge solution called FastEdge.
