Midgar Infra, formerly Altibox Carrier, a long haul fiber optic connectivity provider, plans to extend its Oslo-Stockholm fiber route to Finland through a 200 kilometer unrepeated subsea cable linking Sweden and Finland. The project will create a continuous fiber corridor between Norway, Sweden and Finland with construction scheduled to start in early 2027 and services are expected to be available by 2029.
According to a company press release, the subsea cable will land northeast of Stockholm and southwest of Finland and carry 144 fiber pairs. Designed to operate independently of the existing Sweden-Finland cable system which will not share landing points, cables or rights of way with incumbent infrastructure. Its repeaterless design will keep all active equipment onshore.
“Finalnd is fast becoming one of the places where Europe builds and runs its largest AI systems, and compute on that scale is only as useful as the connectivity feeding it. A diverse corridor that stops at the Swedish border isn’t a diverse Nordic corridor; it’s half a solution,” said, Svein Arild Ims, CEO, Midgard Infra. “By taking the system subsea on a fully unrepeated crossing, with every active component sitting safely onshore, we are not adding complexity to reach Finland, we are removing it. That is precisely the kind of end-to-end resilience the operators building this next wave of AI infrastructure are now asking us for.”
The extension is intended to provide alternative connectivity for telecommunications operators, hyperscalers, and data center providers as Finland attracts more large-scale computing infrastructure. Demand for network capacity is increasing alongside the country’s data center and AI developments, including its selection as a host for one of the European Union’s designated AI factories.
The system will support high capacity dense wavelength division multiplexing (DWDM) deployments with capacity for future optical technologies as demand grows.