Pulsed Media Datacenters

Pulsed Media operates two datacenters in Finland: one in Lauttasaari, Helsinki, and one in Kerava. Both are owned and operated by Magna Capax Finland Oy, the company behind the Pulsed Media tradename. Most seedbox providers rent rack space from someone else. Pulsed Media owns the buildings.

Helsinki datacenter (Lauttasaari)

The Helsinki datacenter is at Kiviaidankatu 2 in the Lauttasaari district. The building was constructed by Academica and previously housed Nebula Oy's colocation facility. Pulsed Media acquired space in the building and has operated there since 2009.

Kiviaidankatu 2 is one of Helsinki's most connected telecom addresses. Telia (who acquired Nebula in 2017), Elisa, and DNA all have facilities in the same building complex. The GNM Internet Exchange operates here, with over 400 connected networks. Fiber routes from Stockholm terminate at the building, and multiple Nordic carriers have a presence there.

Network infrastructure

The Helsinki datacenter runs a Brocade MLXe-8 chassis router at its core, an 8-slot enterprise router with 10 Gigabit Ethernet line cards handling all Layer 3 routing and transit.

Transit comes from two independent upstreams:

FNE Finland Oy (AS47605) — primary transit, aggregated at 60 Gbps
IP-Only — Swedish provider on a separate submarine route for path diversity

The network uses AS203003 with a /22 IPv4 allocation (185.148.0.0/22, 1,024 addresses) from RIPE, allocated in April 2016. Access layer switches are a mix of Arista 7050 series (10G) and Dell Force10 S60 units, with aggregated uplinks of 20-40 Gbps per rack.

Server connections run from 1 Gbps to 20 Gbps depending on the product tier. High-density EPYC storage servers connect directly to the core router or through dedicated Arista switches with LACP bonding.

Power and cooling

The facility sits a few kilometers from the nearest power station. The local power grid has not had an area-wide outage since 2003.

Cooling uses an economizer system: outside air when temperatures allow, air conditioning only during the warmest summer weeks. Helsinki averages about 6 degrees Celsius year-round, so the economizer does most of the work. Measured PUE is under 1.10 for cooling alone. The full PUE including UPS, lighting, and network gear is higher because the UPS is oversized for the current load.

Only network switches and routers get UPS-backed power. Servers run on direct grid power. Each rack has metered circuits for both.

Operational history

The Helsinki datacenter has run continuously since 2009. In the summer of 2023, a technician from another company in the building accidentally drained refrigerant from one of Pulsed Media's AC units, thinking it was theirs. That kind of thing happens in shared buildings. The facility uses raised floor tiles (wood core with vinyl and metal coating) and Rittal rack cabinets.

In a 2024 blog post, the founder described what ongoing maintenance actually looks like: HVAC fans need replacing annually, air filters twice a year, network cables start failing noticeably at 11-12 years, and older Rittal modular PDUs have a fuse burnout problem.

Kerava datacenter

The Kerava datacenter is Pulsed Media's second facility, built from the ground up. The first blog post about the project went up in February 2024, though construction was already well underway. The December 2023 year-in-review described epoxy and painting work for January-February 2024, with the rest to follow by end of April.

The building has 8-meter ceilings. The remaining punch list included electrical cabinets, outside air cooling fans, AC units, racks, and fiber runs, both underground to the building and hundreds of meters internally between the workspace, datacenter room, and telco room.

A 2025 announcement confirmed the structure is finished. What remains is cooling hookup, automation, and configuration. The target is to have most capacity online by Q4 2026, with 3-4 racks deployed rapidly once filling starts. Pulsed Media already has petabytes of hard drives and hundreds of server nodes in inventory waiting to go in.

Capacity and connectivity

The Kerava facility has roughly 400 kW of power capacity. The economizer alone handles over 200 kW at a 22-degree temperature differential, which covers even the hottest summer days without mechanical cooling for a large portion of the load.

Plans include a 600 kW solar installation, about 50% more than the facility's total electrical draw, plus an arrangement where the building owner would buy waste heat during winter.

Connectivity to Helsinki is a 100 Gbps DWDM fiber link installed by Elisa. A first 100 Gbps transit connection direct to Kerava has also been agreed upon.

Build-out costs were estimated at EUR 2,500-3,500 per rack. For comparison, the Vallila deconstruction project, where Pulsed Media salvaged equipment from a decommissioned third-party datacenter in Helsinki (built around 1999, 400 square meters, 90 kW cooling, three 400A 230V inputs), provided salvaged infrastructure components at a fraction of new cost.

Why Finland

Finland's advantages for datacenter hosting are measurable, not marketing.

Climate

Helsinki averages 6.1 degrees Celsius year-round. Monthly averages range from -4.3 in February to 18.0 in July. Summer maximums rarely hit 30. Free-air cooling works most of the year. Mechanical cooling only kicks in during brief summer peaks. The practical result: lower PUE than facilities in warmer climates running compressor cooling year-round.

Power

Finland's transmission grid, operated by Fingrid, hit 99.99995% reliability in both 2023 and 2025, the highest recorded since measurements began. Average interruption per connection point in 2023 was 0.82 minutes for the whole year.

Non-household electricity prices in Finland are the lowest in the EU. First half of 2025: EUR 0.0804 per kWh. Ireland, at the high end: EUR 0.2726. In 2024, 95% of Finnish electricity came from fossil-free sources: nuclear (38%), wind (24%), hydro (17%), and other renewables.

Carbon intensity of Finnish electricity was 27 grams of CO2 per kWh in 2025, among the lowest in Europe.

One thing to watch: Finland's government has proposed moving datacenters from the reduced electricity tax (Category II, EUR 0.0005/kWh) to the standard rate (Category I, EUR 0.0224/kWh), effective July 2026. A replacement support scheme for "value-added datacenters" is being prepared alongside the change. Google put Finnish datacenter expansion on hold pending the outcome.

Privacy

Finland's data protection follows the EU GDPR, implemented nationally through the Data Protection Act (Tietosuojalaki, 1050/2018). The Office of the Data Protection Ombudsman is the supervisory authority.

Finland's Act on Protection of Privacy in Working Life (759/2004) goes beyond the EU baseline: employers may only process data "directly necessary for the employment relationship," a narrower standard than GDPR's general purpose limitation.

Connectivity

Finland connects to continental Europe through the C-Lion1 submarine cable, 1,173 km of fiber from Helsinki to Rostock, Germany, with a design capacity of 144 Tbps across eight fiber pairs. Cinia Group, state-controlled, has operated it since 2016.

Network latency from Helsinki to major European cities: Stockholm about 8 ms, Berlin about 25 ms, Frankfurt about 27 ms, Amsterdam about 28 ms, London about 36 ms.

FICIX, Finland's largest internet exchange, has 60 members and peaked at 444 Gbps in late 2024.

The sovereignty model

Pulsed Media's approach is to own as much of the stack as possible:

Own datacenter facilities (not rented colocation)
Own network (AS203003, own IP space, own core router)
Own server hardware (including custom chassis built from sheet metal with automated manufacturing)
Own software stack (PMSS, open source, developed in-house)
Own operating system choice (Debian across the entire fleet)

In a 2020 interview, the founder put it plainly: "For the seedbox niche we are one of the very few, or maybe the only one, who actually has their own datacenter."

Each layer of ownership removes a dependency, a markup, and a point of failure that someone else controls. The trade-off is real: building and maintaining everything yourself is more work than signing a colocation contract. Pulsed Media has been doing it since 2009.

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