Telco Telia Lietuva has commenced construction on a data center outside the city of Vilnius, Lithuania.

The facility in the village of Rejsztaniszki will cost €26 million ($30.1m) and is scheduled for completion by developers Conres LT in 2027.

The data center will strengthen digital infrastructure in Lithuania, said Telia Lietuva’s CEO and its parent company Telia’s head of Baltics, Giedre Kaminskaitė-Salters, in a post on LinkedIn. The facility will sit within a two-hectare plot and eventually house up to 800 server racks.

DCD has approached the firm for comment.

“Today, in the Vilnius district, we laid the symbolic cornerstone for our new data center,” said Kaminskaitė-Salters. “This €26 million project will be connected to two existing Telia data centers, creating a highly reliable infrastructure network for Lithuanian businesses. 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. More may be added in the future, Daniel Karpovič, Telia Lietuva’s head of enterprise, told Data Centre Magazine in January 2022. An access road from the nearby motorway is also planned, to be donated to the Vilnius District Municipality upon completion.

After the new data center is completed, Telia stated it will sell the site and lease access from the eventual buyer.

Founded in 1991, Telia is one of Lithuania’s largest telcos. 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.

Last year, the firm also collaborated with Polish telco Algo Poland to complete its first low-impact environmental telecom pole in the town of Palanga, Lithuania.

Learn more about the data center market in Poland and Eastern Europe, and meet with other executives and experts from the region at the DCN Warsaw event later this year.