Telco Telia Lietuva has commenced construction on a data center outside the city of Vilnius, Lithuania. The facility in the village of Rejsztaniszki will sit within a two-hectare plot, eventually house up to 800 server racks and will cost €26 million. It is scheduled for completion in 2027.
"Lithuania has a strong technological foundation, top-level talent, a robust network, and the capacity to generate sufficient renewable energy. These are the prerequisites for becoming a clean digital economy hub in Northern Europe. A place where data, the new oil of our times, is securely stored and managed:, said Giedre Kaminskaitė-Salters, Telia Lietuva’s CEO and its parent company Telia’s head of Baltics, in a post on LinkedIn. “The new center will meet the rapidly growing demand driven by AI and will enable strategically important data to be stored in Lithuania: securely, sustainably, and reliably.”
The new data center will be built in phases, using modules that house up to 200 server racks each. The first phase of construction will see two modules assembled and connected, followed by two more before the cessation of works in 2027.
After the new data center is completed, Telia stated it will sell the site and lease access from the eventual buyer. The Rejsztaniszki site will be its third in the country, and will be connected to the other two by a fiber-optic cable connection. It will also be the first such facility in the Baltic region to boast a BREEAM sustainability certificate, being powered exclusively by renewable energy while recycling waste heat into a local district heating scheme. Telia has launched similar schemes across the wider region, including in Finland, where the telco succeeded in boosting waste heat recovery levels from 60 percent to 90 percent at its Pitäjänmäki data center in Helsinki.
Photo: Giedre Kaminskaite-Salters' LinkedIn