Published 2026-09-12 · Event 2026-08-18

Fingrid: nearly 5 GW of data-centre projects hold signed connection agreements as of mid-August 2026

On 18 August 2026 Fingrid said data-centre projects with signed connection agreements had a planned final combined capacity of nearly 5 gigawatts by mid-August, including distribution-network projects and based on information from project developers. The same notice says a signature does not guarantee full implementation. Signed is not energised, and the total is not a named Finnish or Swedish hall.

Fingrid’s 18 August 2026 notice is the dated transmission-system source used here. It says the planned final combined capacity of data-centre projects that have signed connection agreements totalled nearly 5 gigawatts by mid-August, based on information provided by project developers, including projects connected to distribution networks. Those words are a national planned-capacity observation. They are not a list of named campuses and not a Swedish queue table.

The authority’s own caveat is the load-bearing sentence. Signing a connection agreement does not guarantee that a project will be implemented at its full planned scale. Construction typically begins after a signature, and electricity consumption increases gradually over several years. Projects also do not immediately use their full declared capacity once connected. A slide that pastes 5 GW into a brochure as built Nordic AI power is rewriting Fingrid’s paragraph.

Two neighbouring rows in the same notice must stay separate. Electric-boiler projects under construction or already in operation have exceeded 3 gigawatts. Connection agreements have been signed for more than 4 gigawatts of electricity storage. Those are not data-centre megawatts. If all signed consumption projects were implemented in full, Fingrid says they would increase Finland’s electricity consumption by nearly 40 percent compared with 2025, and that growth on that scale would likely take at least five years.

A earlier Fingrid paper uses a different metric. The 3 March 2026 financial-statements bulletin for 2025 says connection enquiries related to consumption reached over 100 gigawatts, more than half of which related to data-centre projects. Enquiries are not signed agreements. One hundred gigawatts is not five. Mixing the two dates invents a single Finnish queue the sources did not publish. Neither paper names Horndal, Falun, Hamre or Mikkeli.

DataCenterSweden records the mid-August 2026 snapshot as a Finnish signed-agreement total. No Swedish project identifier is attached. The next Swedish update still needs a dated Svenska kraftnät or network-owner paper. Until then, nearly 5 GW stays labelled as planned final combined capacity on signed Finnish agreements — not reserved Swedish import and not energised IT load.

Why it matters

A signed-agreement total is the easiest Finnish figure to paste into a Swedish brochure. It is usable only if nearly 5 GW stays planned, signed and unnamed — and if 100 GW of 2025 enquiries stay on their own line.

What remains unknown

The August notice does not name the projects inside the 5 GW, does not publish an energization date, and does not assign any of the total to a Swedish hall.

Sources