en.Wedoany.com Reported - Finnish telecom operator Elisa signed its first large-scale data center connection agreements in the second quarter, marking the official launch of its data center connectivity business. Elisa CEO Topi Manner stated during an earnings call that the data center market is a key long-term growth opportunity for the company, noting that Finland is "an ideal location for data center operators."

According to a joint study released in 2025 by the Confederation of Finnish Industries and the Finnish Data Center Association, the current market size of data centers in Finland is approximately 285 megawatts (MW), with potential growth exceeding 1.5 gigawatts (GW) by 2030, and the total scale of announced projects surpassing 3.4 GW. Manner indicated that this growth creates opportunities for telecom operators and revealed that the agreements signed by Elisa involve new data centers with a capacity exceeding 100 MW. He did not disclose the specific companies involved in the agreements. Elisa previously collaborated with Wind River to deploy fully automated edge data centers and believes the primary data center opportunity lies in fiber-optic interconnection of facilities. Despite expectations of long-term growth in this sector, Elisa's second-quarter revenue was EUR 551 million (USD 630 million), down 0.3% year-on-year, with performance remaining largely flat.