Renewable power generator Sunly has applied for planning permission to build a 180MW AI data center outside the village of Risti, in Lääne-Nigula municipality, Estonia.

If built, the structure will become the country’s single biggest electricity consumer and the largest facility of its type in the Baltic Sea region.

The data center will cost Sunly €1.7 billion ($1.94bn) to construct, Sunly’s CEO, Prits Lepaseps, told the Lääne Elu newspaper. DCD has approached the firm for comment.

“We want to create the conditions for the necessary infrastructure to be created in Estonia for the implementation of artificial intelligence,” said Lepaseps. “The location of Risti allows for the connection of local renewable energy production and large-scale electricity consumption. This will provide certainty for our electricity production and create new technological capabilities for Estonia.”

Founded in 2019, Sunly operates 1GW of renewable power generation from solar and wind farms across Estonia, Latvia, and Poland.

The construction of the Risti data center, said Sunly, will create 150 jobs in the area. The facility will likely be powered by a solar park that the firm is also building outside the village. Additionally, Sunly has plans to construct an additional wind farm and battery energy storage system (BESS) in the wider region. The planning application for the data center would likely take up to eight months to complete, Lääne-Nigula Municipality told ERR.ee.

According to Sunly’s energy hub development lead, Kaarel Aus, parts of the facility could be online by 2028.

Once complete, it will also provide Estonia with the means to run and train AI models, services which foreign technology firms currently provide.

The news followed Sunly’s announcement in September that a new BESS will be built at the 45MW solar park in neighboring Põhja-Pärnumaa municipality, which it operates with Finnish forestry management company Metsagrupp.

Risti is located some 66km (41 miles) southwest of Estonia’s capital city, Tallinn.

Estonia has a small data center market, with DataCenterMap listing just 12 facilities in the country, most of which are around Tallinn. Operators include Infonet DC, Telia, Server Farm, and WaveCom.

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.