Trading firm XTX Markets is to build its own data center in Finland.
The company this week announced plans to invest more than €1 billion ($1.04bn) to develop a 478-acre data center complex in Kajaani, in Finland’s Kainuu region.
The firm has begun construction on its first data center, with completion planned for 2026. The 15,000 sqm (161,460 sq ft) facility will total 22.5MW of IT capacity across three data halls.
The site will house infrastructure for XTX’s machine learning technology, which is used to analyze large amounts of data and produce price forecasts for financial instruments.
XTX said it intends to build four additional data centers on the same site in the coming years and will look to offer waste heat to the local community.
Joshua Leahy, XTX Markets CTO, said: "We believe the best way to future-proof our business is to invest in our own infrastructure, which we can continue to leverage over time. Having our own data centers enable us to deploy increased computing power on our terms, cost-effectively, and in a way that keeps pace with our growing business. Our need for compute has outgrown available leasing options. We are building ahead of our needs to establish a backbone for future growth of the business."
Sundström AB is the contractor for the groundwork, while YIT is to carry out the main construction works for the first building.
XTX Markets is an algorithmic trading firm, relying on machine learning to produce price forecasts for more than 50,000 financial instruments across equities, fixed income, currencies, commodities, and crypto. XTX processes trades worth $250 billion each day.
The firm says it has a research cluster currently containing more than 25,000 GPUs with 650 petabytes of usable storage. A job listing suggests XTX has established a presence in more 50 data centers globally.
Reports that XTX was planning its own campus surfaced last year, and could reportedly total 250MW at full build-out.
Kajaani is also home to the Lumi supercomputer, which we visited in the latest magazine.
Iceland’s Borealis Data Centers revealed in February that it had purchased a data center at the Renforsin Ranta Business Park, marking its first international expansion. Google is also set to develop a data center in the area.
Wille Rydman, Minister of Economic Affairs, said: "We are delighted that XTX Markets has chosen Finland as the location for its ambitious data center project. The speed at which the company has managed to break ground is truly impressive, and the significant expansion of the project is fantastic news."
