AI in Finland: companies, research and public support

AI in Finland is not one programme or one agency. It is a set of public bodies that each do a different job: research centres, national and European computers, funders, ministries and regulators. This guide maps who does what, using each body's own pages, read on 7 Oct 2026.

The title promises companies, so one sentence on that: the companies building with AI are covered in our post on Finnish AI companies. This page covers the public side around them. Where a source page is dated before 2026, or shows no date, we say so.

The table below is the shortest way to see the system. Each actor's name links to its own official page, and the role column is taken from that page. The last column shows the page date where one is shown, because several pages are older than 2026 or undated.

Read the Ministry of Economic Affairs and Employment row with care. Its page is from 2020, and we found no current official page saying whether that programme is active or closed.

The best-known research body is the Finnish Center for Artificial Intelligence (FCAI). Its own page describes it as "a community of experts in artificial intelligence in Finland", initiated by Aalto University, the University of Helsinki and VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland. It also calls FCAI "one of the Research Council of Finland's Flagships". 1

The page says FCAI runs seven Research Programs (R1 to R7). It lists six Highlight Programs (one of them was merged into Research Program 7 in 2022) and ten Special Interest Groups, and describes about 70 professors with their groups. The page shows no date, so treat these counts as a snapshot of 7 Oct 2026. 1

The flagship label comes from the Research Council of Finland (formerly the Academy of Finland). Its Finnish Flagship Programme page describes 14 flagships, with a Research Council funding contribution of "almost 300 million euros". That figure is for the programme as a whole, not for FCAI. 2 VTT's description of its part in FCAI is older, from 11 May 2020: it focuses on how AI research results are used in practice. 4

The Research Council also funds research that needs big computers. Its 2026 call for international collaboration in high-performance computing supports work using EuroHPC resources or the LUMI supercomputer. It opened on 1 Apr 2026 and closed on 6 May 2026, so it is not open now. 3

Three names recur: LUMI, the LUMI AI Factory and Roihu. They are easy to mix up. LUMI is a European supercomputer, the LUMI AI Factory is a service built around AI use, and Roihu is a national system for researchers. CSC (the IT Center for Science) publishes the pages for the last two.5 9

The LUMI consortium's own page calls LUMI EuroHPC JU's flagship supercomputer. It gives LUMI's sustained computing power as 380 petaflops (HPL, the High-Performance Linpack benchmark) in its final configuration, and, citing the Top500 list published in November 2025, calls it the 9th fastest globally. Rankings change with each list, so check the current Top500 before quoting it. 6

The LUMI AI Factory is one of the first seven AI Factories that EuroHPC JU selected on 10 Dec 2024. 7 CSC's page describes it as "the biggest AI Factory in the European Union". That is CSC's own description, not an independent ranking. The page says the AI Factory offers a range of services, including AI-focused HPC resources, and that the services will be free of charge for startups, SMEs and academic researchers. Large enterprises pay a fee. 5

The same page also looks ahead. It says the procurement of the LUMI-AI supercomputer was announced in August 2026, with deployment in the second half of 2027, and that the LUMI-IQ quantum computer is scheduled for deployment in autumn 2027. The page carries no date of its own, so read these as plans as of 7 Oct 2026. 5

Roihu is CSC's national supercomputer. Its page says it is built for researchers at Finnish higher education institutions and research institutes, has 486 CPU nodes and 132 GPU nodes, and replaces the earlier national systems Mahti and Puhti by the end of summer 2026. It says the HPL performance is estimated to exceed 10 Pflops for the CPU nodes and 20 Pflops for the GPU nodes, and that Roihu was opened for researchers in June 2026. The page shows no date; its newest news item is from 29 Jun 2026. 9

For access, the LUMI AI Factory page links to EuroHPC's AI Factories access calls page, and the Roihu page links to CSC's how to start using CSC's services page. We did not open either, so we cannot say whether any intake is open. 5 9

Business Finland, the public innovation funder, ran a Generative AI Campaign from May 2024 to June 2026. A Business Finland blog post dated 2 Sep 2026 says around 250 projects have received funding and approximately EUR 70 million was granted during the campaign. The same post says AI has been selected as one of Business Finland's thematic growth areas and that AI-related activities will be specified in the coming months. 10

Business Finland's 2026 funding call for high-growth companies to leverage AI ran from 2 Feb to 15 Apr 2026, and its page is labelled Ended. The page, updated on 3 Feb 2026, says the grant is typically 50% of eligible project costs for SMEs and 40% for midcap companies. The loan can cover 50% of eligible costs, or 70% for a justified reason. It also describes a computing grant covering 100% of CSC's computing costs, up to EUR 100,000, where the maximum support intensity allows. 11

The Research Council of Finland funds research rather than companies. Its Flagship Programme and its 2026 high-performance computing call are described above, and that call closed on 6 May 2026. 2 3 No open AI call from either funder was confirmed on 7 Oct 2026. For funding that is not specific to AI, see our guide to startup funding in Finland.

The honest answer needs care. On 23 Oct 2017 the Ministry of Economic Affairs and Employment published a release titled "Working group: Eight key actions for making Finland a top country in artificial intelligence". It says the report lists eight key actions for taking Finland towards the age of AI, and points readers to tekoalyaika.fi, which it describes as Finland's artificial intelligence programme. 18 On 13 Nov 2020 the same ministry announced the Tekoäly 4.0 (Artificial Intelligence 4.0) programme, aimed at speeding up the digitalisation of business. 14 The 2020 page also says Finland "was among the first EU countries to create a national AI strategy, on which the current programme is based", without naming or dating that strategy. We found no current official page saying whether either programme is active or closed, so we do not describe a national AI strategy as being in force.

What the government's project page does show is the Interministerial AI Coordination and Data Economy Growth Programme, running from 1 Oct 2024 to 31 Oct 2026. The Ministry of Transport and Communications has overall responsibility. The Ministry of Education and Culture and the Ministry of Economic Affairs and Employment contribute, in cooperation with the Ministry of Finance and the Prime Minister's Office. The project has two parts: coordination of AI in government, and a Data Economy Growth Programme run by the Ministry of Economic Affairs and Employment. The page says over 60 projects and trials related to AI are underway in state administration. It does not mention a national AI strategy and shows no date. 13

The government has also said it wants an EU AI gigafactory. In a release of 10 Jun 2025, the Prime Minister said Finland is "aiming to host the EU's new AI gigafactory in Finland", and that Nokia had expressed willingness to coordinate the business consortium. The release reports no decision and says the European Commission's selection process would continue in the autumn. We did not check what has happened since. 15

Supervision is shared between several bodies. A Government release of 22 Dec 2025 says the acts regulating the powers of the national authorities supervising the EU Artificial Intelligence Act would enter into force on 1 Jan 2026. It names market surveillance authorities and authorities supervising fundamental rights in general terms, and it does not mention Traficom. 16

For transparency, Traficom's guidance (20 Aug 2026, updated 26 Aug 2026) says: "In Finland, Traficom is the main authority supervising compliance with the AI transparency obligations." The obligations have applied since 2 Aug 2026. Providers whose systems were placed on the market before that date must meet the machine-readable marking requirement by 2 Dec 2026 at the latest. The page adds that sector-specific market surveillance authorities supervise the transparency obligations for providers and deployers of high-risk AI systems, and that the European Commission supervises cases where an AI system is based on a general-purpose AI model and the same provider develops both the model and the system. 17

The Ministry of Economic Affairs and Employment's AI regulation page names the authorities that protect fundamental rights under Article 77 of the AI Act: the Data Protection Ombudsman, the Non-Discrimination Ombudsman, the Ombudsman for Equality, the National Discrimination and Equality Tribunal, the Chancellor of Justice, the Parliamentary Ombudsman, the occupational safety and health authorities and the Consumer Ombudsman. The page shows no date and still uses wording from before the Act applied, so we use it only for this list. 19

Companies are the users and builders of the system above. They have no row in the table because we found no official page that lets us describe them one by one. Our post on Finnish AI companies covers them, and our overview of tech companies in Finland gives the wider employer picture. Business Finland's news page of 6 Feb 2025 presents The Finnish AI Landscape 2025, a joint publication with AI Finland; we did not open the report itself. 12

• Companies, which are covered in the separate posts linked above.
• FCAI's own funding. We could not open the pages that would confirm the figures, so we give none.
• Other university and institute research groups beyond the founders of FCAI.
• Private investment in AI, and any call that opens after 7 Oct 2026.

On private money, see our guide to venture capital in Finland. We will recheck this page in early January 2027, because several items above are scheduled to change before then.

• Who builds with AI: Finnish AI companies
• The wider picture: tech companies in Finland
• Money for founders: startup funding in Finland
• The setting around it: the Finnish startup ecosystem