Kajaani became the Arctic capital of data centres and supercomputers

When the UPM paper mill was closed down in Kajaani in December 2008, it was both the end of one era and the beginning of a new one. Now, one of the most powerful supercomputers in the world is located on the site where the paper mill used to be. The feared catastrophe caused by the closure of the mill never happened. The paper rolls the former mill shipped around the world have changed to global data exports, and Kajaani is on its way to becoming the cradle of European artificial intelligence.

The “Hunger Land” of the past is no longer more than a distant memory. We already became familiar with hearing terms like sudden structural change subsidies, disappearing jobs and declining population used in headlines to describe Kainuu. Now, the tune is totally different. There is talk about the miracle of the Hunger Land and exceptional economic growth.

Everything goes back to a major transformation in the autumn of 2008. The forest industry giant UPM announced that it was going to drive down its traditional paper mill in Kajaani, leaving more than 500 people without work. Unlike in Voikkaa a couple of years earlier, the plans for the closure were different.

“When the UPM paper mill in Kajaani was closed, we met with the company’s management and city representatives the next day and agreed on cooperation. The company set up a business park organisation at the paper mill and tasked it with acquiring at least as many jobs – that is 535 – as there were outgoing employees,” says Risto Hämäläinen, Director of Development, City of Kajaani.

Thus was created Renforsin ranta business park, the current cradle of data centres and supercomputers. Salla Ventonen, Service Manager of Renforsin ranta, has seen both the golden days of the paper mill, its end and the new rise of the region. Ventonen is a long-term paperworker. She acted as a shop steward at UPM’s Kajaani paper mill when the announcement of the closure was published.

Although the decision to close down the mill was a hard blow, when the initial shock had dispelled, strong faith in the future remained. According to Ventonen, the decisive factor was specifically the fact that future plans had already been made before the closure decision. Although, in spite of her shop steward position, she was not aware of them at that point either. When the decision to close the factory was announced on Wednesday, the paper machines were run down as a protest for the rest of the week. However, the very next week we already got some information about a business park being established, she recalls.

A key factor in Kajaani’s rise on the global data center map has been CSC – IT Center for Science, which placed Finland’s first national supercomputer at Renforsin Ranta business park in 2013. Today, supercomputers and their immense computing power and AI capacity are essential for cutting-edge research across nearly all fields. Companies also have growing needs for high-performance computing.

Read the whole story: Kajaani became the Arctic capital of data centres and supercomputers – Kajaani Data Center Ecosystem

Kajaani is part of the InnoCities network. The spearheads in developing Kajaani are measurement technology and measurements as well as high-performance computing, artificial intelligence and data centres.

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