Valorem is building Finland's data centers from the power side first

Valorem is stacking up Finnish data center sites the way an energy developer stacks up project options. The French firm's first move is a zoning agreement with the city of Savonlinna covering 32 hectares in the Nätkin industrial area, with the first phase targeting 30 to 50MW from 2028 and more than 100MW by 2032, according to Data Center Dynamics. A city plan amendment goes to the Savonlinna council at the end of September, and the campus is meant to make its waste heat available to the local district heating network.

Savonlinna, a town in the South Savo region of southeast Finland, gets a heat source out of that arrangement; Valorem gets a zoning amendment. The district heating clause is a permission play as much as an engineering one, and the timeline says more about the consent process than the build: local press first reported the plan in May, per Data Center Dynamics.

Savonlinna is one of several: the same outlet reports a 60MW data center paired with a solar and storage campus on 55 hectares at Eurajoki in western Finland, plus a project in the Halme industrial area of Kankaanpää in the southwest whose details have not been shared.

What ties them together is who is doing the developing: Valorem is an energy company, with roughly 1.5GW of Finnish wind, solar and hydro projects in development or operation and more than 8.5GW across Europe since its founding in 1994. That inverts the sequence that has defined Finland's recent data center wave. Google's €13 billion Finnish pledge paired server halls in four municipalities with a nuclear life-extension PPA, wind projects and a 94MW battery, because the anchor was a balance sheet and the generation followed the tenant. Valorem is assembling the generation and the zoning first and leaving the tenant column blank.

The blank column carries the risk. As this publication has argued, anchored assets get infrastructure pricing while everything else must bring its own capital stack or accept merchant risk, and nothing disclosed about Valorem's Finnish sites changes that picture: no offtaker, no capital partner, no price. Until one appears, a campus that could reach 100MW is a development option, valuable but not yet financeable, valued off a lease nobody has signed.

The bet underneath is legible: permitted land and grid rights are appreciating faster than the shells that will sit on them, so an owner of both can rent to whichever tenant signs. Watch the Eurajoki and Kankaanpää filings for a name in the offtake column; Savonlinna's council vote lands first, and it settles only the land.