In a move that it said will reduce latency to Western Europe for multinational enterprises in a key region, global connectivity and digital infrastructure provider Arelion has completed a major expansion of its Baltic network, constructing a fully diverse, high-capacity route between Helsinki and Warsaw, creating a resilient ring for traffic between Sweden, Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Poland.
Explaining the rationale for the move, Arelion noted that Finland’s datacentre market is projected to reach $5.23bn by 2030, growing at a CAGR of 54.6 percent, underscoring the importance of robust digital infrastructure across the Baltic region. The project, partially funded by the EU’s Connecting Europe Facility 2 (CEF2) program, highlights how strategic investment can advance digital sovereignty in a historically underserved region.
Scandinavia has long been regarded as a connectivity hotspot, and to maintain this reputation for its clients in the era of increased and network-intensive artificial intelligence (AI) workloads, Arelion upgraded its Scandinavian network in summer 2025 to connect hyperscale datacentres and serve the region’s booming AI markets.
The new terrestrial path is intended to reduce latency between the Baltics and Western Europe, increase diversity in a geopolitically sensitive region and secure future capacity for what the connectivity provider regards as an underserved EU region.
The diverse terrestrial route connects the Baltics to Western Europe via subsea and land systems from Helsinki through the Baltics to Warsaw, bypassing Copenhagen and Stockholm to avoid bottlenecks and ensure high-availability connectivity for customers. Using open optical line systems with 400G coherent pluggable optics and 1.6 Tbps connectivity from its Waves programme, the route will provide long-term scalability to support what are anticipated as being the massive data flows of next-generation applications in Europe’s growing AI sectors.
Arelion’s expansion is also claimed to be able to deliver backbone-grade performance with predictable service-level agreements (SLAs) to reduce downtime risk, ensuring reliable business continuity for customers in cloud, financial services, manufacturing and other critical sectors.
Arelion added that by combining network fibres from regional partners with own infrastructure, the expansion provides enterprises and service providers with scalable, future-ready connectivity amid increased investment in local markets.
The infrastructure is also designed to provide customers with reliable, secure connectivity from Baltic markets into Nordic, Central and Western European data centre hubs. Arelion believes that organisations with latency-sensitive applications can benefit from consistent, predictable performance, resilient infrastructure and backbone-level security that could mitigate DDoS attacks and routing threats before they reach enterprise networks.
The route offers metro routing flexibility in major cities, including Warsaw and Helsinki and supports scalable IP Transit, Dedicated Internet Access (DIA), Ethernet, DDoS Mitigation and other global services.
Among the various points-of-presence (PoPs) throughout the region that will be connected through the expansion are Arelion’s Iso-Roobertinkatu 21-25 PoP in Helsinki; Greenergy’s Tallinn DC-1 PoP in Hüüru, Estonia; Tet’s Pērses datacenter in Riga, Latvia; The Riga TV Tower datacentre; the Delska DC2 (formerly RackRay) data centre in Vilnius, Lithuania; the Vilnius TV Tower datacentre; and Equinix’s WA1 datacentre in Warsaw.
Commenting on the route, Arelion vice-president and chief evangelist Mattias Fridström said: “This new route enhances diversity and bandwidth between the Baltics and Western Europe, delivering the secure, low-latency connectivity our customers need to scale AI and cloud applications. With support from the EU, we are strengthening Europe’s digital sovereignty while ensuring that enterprises and hyperscale operators can rely on resilient infrastructure to power innovation.”
