Summary
- YIT has added fit-out, MEP, and commissioning to its contract for XTX Markets’ third Kajaani data centre.
- The latest phase follows YIT’s shell-and-core work and is due to start in late 2026.
- XTX Markets has previously said it intends to invest more than €1 billion in its Kajaani data centre campus.
YIT has expanded its role on XTX Markets’ third data centre in Kajaani, Finland, taking responsibility for the building’s interior finishing, building services engineering, and commissioning after completing the shell-and-core phase.
The Finnish contractor said the latest agreement will move into delivery in late 2026. The value of the contract has not been disclosed.
The deal extends a relationship that has grown alongside XTX Markets’ Kajaani campus. YIT first agreed to build a data centre for the algorithmic trading company in 2024, followed by a second facility in 2025. It was then appointed in June this year to deliver the shell and core of the third building.
XTX Markets has previously said it expects to invest more than €1 billion in the wider Kajaani campus as it increases the computing infrastructure supporting its trading operations.
From structure to critical systems
The new scope moves the third building beyond its structural phase and into the systems that determine whether a data centre can actually operate. Mechanical and electrical installation, building services integration, controls, testing, and commissioning sit much closer to the eventual operational performance of the facility than the shell-and-core package alone.
That makes continuity between construction phases particularly relevant on large data centre projects. A contractor carrying work from the structure into MEP and commissioning has visibility across interfaces that can otherwise become difficult handover points between civil, mechanical, electrical, controls, and customer equipment packages.
Commissioning is also where design assumptions are tested against installed infrastructure. Power systems, cooling, monitoring, redundancy arrangements, alarms, and other building services must operate not only individually but together under different load and failure scenarios before the facility is accepted for operation.
YIT has been building data centres in Finland for more than a decade and is currently involved in multiple projects around the country. Its growing exposure to the sector has become significant enough to alter the contractor’s corporate growth expectations.
A day before announcing the latest XTX contract, YIT doubled its group revenue-growth target for the 2025–2029 strategy period, citing expansion in Finland’s data centre market. The company raised its target from at least 5% compound annual growth to at least 10%.
Kajaani develops around compute demand
XTX Markets is unusual among major data centre developers because the campus is being built primarily around the trading company’s own computational requirements rather than as a conventional colocation development.
Its expansion in Kajaani nevertheless carries many of the same delivery pressures facing hyperscale projects elsewhere in Europe: substantial electrical demand, specialist building services, long equipment lead times, and the need to bring successive blocks into service without compromising operational resilience.
The third building also shows how large campuses are commonly delivered in phases rather than as a single construction event. Shell-and-core completion secures the physical envelope, but the subsequent fit-out and commissioning phase determines how quickly that structure can become usable compute capacity.
For YIT, the award deepens a repeat-client relationship at the same campus while giving its infrastructure and building-construction operations another technically intensive data centre package. For XTX Markets, keeping the same contractor through successive phases may reduce some interface risk as the third building moves towards completion.
The precise commissioning timetable and capacity of the third building have not been disclosed. Work on the newly awarded phase is scheduled to begin before the end of 2026, while the wider Kajaani programme continues as part of XTX Markets’ longer-term expansion of its computing estate.
