Building data center capacity for the AI era

When you’re building infrastructure that may eventually scale to hundreds of megawatts, location is part of the architecture. 

”Oulu gives us the combination we need to scale: a cool climate, strong access to renewable power, good connectivity, and a strong technology ecosystem,” Jesse says. ”The region also offers significant room to grow. For us, it’s not just about what we can build today, but what the location allows us to build over the long term.” 

For customers, location has practical consequences. It affects how infrastructure can scale, how it connects, and how it is operated. It also determines the jurisdiction under which customers’ infrastructure and data are managed. 

Campus Oulu is also a brownfield development. Rather than starting from an empty plot, Glesys is transforming an existing industrial facility that previously housed data center infrastructure before spending years as laboratory space. That gives the project an unusual starting point. Parts of the existing infrastructure can be reused, including raised flooring and elements of the cooling systems. Other parts need to be adapted or rebuilt to meet the new campus’s requirements. 

”Every brownfield project comes with surprises,” Jesse says. ”Figuring them out is part of what makes it interesting.”

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Converting an existing facility means working with what the building offers, and knowing when not to. On paper, Campus Oulu had inherited a working network. In practice, cabling had been added, removed, and rerouted over the years before Glesys took over.

“The more we uncovered, we realized that reality doesn’t match the blueprints, so we ended up rebuilding the network. Connectivity is a lifeline to a data center, just like electricity, which is why we’re working so hard on it right now,” Jesse says.

That means routing new fiber into newly built rooms and tracing the existing cable runs so the team knows exactly what is there and what is being used.

“Documentation and routes need to be 100% trustworthy going forward.”

For a campus designed to grow over time, that level of control matters. What gets built today becomes the foundation for every phase that follows. As AI workloads increase the amount of data moving between compute, clouds, and locations, connectivity grows in importance alongside compute capacity.

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AI infrastructure changes not only what’s inside the rack, but also the building around it. The equipment needed to power and cool high-density workloads is far denser than what traditional data centers were typically designed around, and the facilities themselves need to be designed differently as a result.

At Campus Oulu, that became very literal when the original flooring in the white halls wasn’t strong enough for the new requirements, so we needed entirely new floor tiles. A lot of them.

“We’ve received seven or eight truckloads so far, each carrying about 22 tons of tiles. Ironically, they’re heavy enough that we can’t stack them directly next to each other in storage; it needs space in between, so it doesn’t overload the concrete floor underneath,” Jesse says.

With roughly 30 pallets per truckload, that’s now well over 200 pallets of tile spread across the building as construction progresses. It’s an unusual logistical problem, and a good illustration of how far the effects of higher-density compute reach: all the way down to the floor the servers stand on.

Power capacity gets much of the attention when new AI infrastructure is announced. But power alone doesn’t make a data center ready for high-density workloads. As compute density increases, power delivery and cooling must grow alongside it.

Campus Oulu is therefore being developed to support liquid-cooled environments as well as the infrastructure required for high-density workloads.

“At this scale, you have to think about power, cooling, and expansion together,” Jesse says. “We’re not just designing for the first phase. The decisions we’re making now need to give us a foundation we can continue to build on as customer requirements grow.”

Efficiency is part of that engineering challenge too. Campus Oulu will operate on green electricity from day one, and the team is exploring opportunities to use surplus heat within local energy systems as the campus develops. The goal is infrastructure that can support demanding customer environments efficiently as they grow.

Campus Oulu’s long-term potential is about what customers can build with us. Organizations rarely have one fixed infrastructure requirement forever. A customer might need dedicated infrastructure or colocation today, add high-density compute tomorrow, and eventually connect those environments with cloud services as its architecture evolves.

Campus Oulu significantly expands Glesys ability to support that development. It will become part of the wider portfolio of colocation, dedicated hardware, cloud, and hybrid infrastructure that Glesys provides.

For customers, that means the conversation doesn’t have to start with a single product. It can start with what the infrastructure needs to achieve (performance, density, control, compliance, scalability), and the architecture follows. The aim is to let customers’ infrastructure evolve without redesigning around data center limitations every time their requirements change.

The physical requirements of infrastructure are changing as European organizations ask more questions about where that infrastructure runs. For many, performance and scalability now sit alongside data residency, governance, and regulatory requirements. They want to know where their infrastructure is located, who operates it, and which legal framework applies.

Campus Oulu adds significant new capacity within Glesys’ Nordic infrastructure footprint while keeping that infrastructure in Europe. Customers shouldn’t have to choose between infrastructure that can support demanding new workloads and the control they need over where and how those workloads run. Campus Oulu is being built to deliver both.

Campus Oulu is still unmistakably a construction site. The halls are full of pipework and cabling. Fiber is being routed. Power and cooling infrastructure is taking shape. Equipment is arriving. And hundreds of pallets of unusually heavy floor tiles await their final destination.

Beyond the November deadline lies the long-term potential to develop the campus to as much as 300 MW. The ambition isn’t measured in megawatts alone. It’s about giving customers room to build increasingly demanding infrastructure while retaining control, transparency, and the ability to evolve as their requirements change. And while the scale is new, the underlying approach isn’t: understand the infrastructure, control the details, and build something customers can rely on.

AI is changing what digital infrastructure needs to be. Campus Oulu is how Glesys is building for what comes next. And it’s our next step towards creating a better place for data.