Russian search giant Yandex is getting ready to build a data center in neighboring Finland, its third such facility outside Russia.
The project is slated to break ground in August on an 8-hectare parcel 60km north of Helsinki that Yandex purchased from the Mäntsälä municipality for 1.5 million euros, Tatyana Komarova of Yandex’s press service said in an exchange with the business daily Vedomosti.
This is a way of minimizing infrastructure costs in a friendlier investment environment, Komarova explained: with its proximity to Russia, reasonable land and electricity costs, “precisely” the kind of Nordic climate to properly cool servers, ready-to-use infrastructure and pledges of support from local authorities, Yandex found the area an “optimal site” for the data center, which will employ 50 full-time staff.
Yandex already operates foreign data centers in the Netherlands and the U.S. Back home, one of the company’s largest such projects is a new 2.7 billion ruble ($90 million) center outside Ryazan, in central Russia. Launched last October, the Ryazan site is expected to accommodate 100,000 servers by 2019.
Yandex anticipates no bickering with Russian authorities over the decision to partially relocate outside the country. In the IT world borders count for little; another leading Russian Internet player, Mail.ru Group, has been using data centers abroad for years.
