Who Will Build The €600 Million Datacenter In Estonia?


In the recent Estonian news, we found out that a company known as “Data Valley Enterprises OÜ” is planning to establish Europe’s largest data centre in Estonia. According to the news published on the Estonian Äripäev, the company wants to establish a 30 000 square meter server farm with an initial investment of €170 million and then expand this to 200 000 square meters using a total investment of €600 million.

The announcement was made by the representative of Data Valley Enterprises, Jussi Vartiainen together with Eerik-Niiles Kross, who is currently in the running for the mayor of Tallinn. According to Vartiainen “Estonia has the ideal climate for server maintenance, innovative business environment and favourable taxation. At the same time in the workforce and land prices are cheaper than in western and northern Europe.”

The initial server farm should be ready by 2017. Enterprise Estonia, an agency promoting business and regional development in Estonia, confirmed that the investors came to Estonian through their organisation and have presented the needed letters of guarantee.

However there still remains a lot of unanswered questions about the whole project. Such as, who is really behind such a massive investment? After all, there is absolutely no information about “Data Valley Enterprises”, Jussi Vartainen does not seem to be present on any Social Media and Eerik-Niiles Kross announced the news conveniently on the verge of the elections. Is this just an elaborate political plot or an actual investment surrounded by mystery? We set out to find out.

The company’s public information reveals that there are in total five directors, most with Finnish sounding names: Paavo Juhani Huhtanen, Teppo Tuomas Viljakainen, Jussi Kalevi Vartiainen, Jukka Aulis Jääskeläinen and Marco Wass.

Out of those, only Marco Wass was on Linkedin and he holds the role of a sales director for TDC Oy Finland, which seems to be a part of TDC, a Danish telecommunications company established in 1879. Their reported revenue for 2010 was around €3.51 billion, so they do have the backing for a project of this size. They also seem to be in the right industry and have the needed experience.

So if this is in fact the company behind the investment – it does start to look more likely to be the real deal, which would be great news for Estonia. We have reached out to TDC and will update this story once they get back to us.

Top Image Courtesy of Shutterstock // Data Centre