Midgard Infra will build a subsea cable between Sweden and Finland spanning approximately 200 kilometers and carrying 144 fiber pairs, with construction starting in early 2027 and service entry planned for 2029.

The Nordic fiber operator, formerly Altibox Carrier until a rebrand this year, announced it will extend its planned Oslo–Stockholm long-haul fiber route into Finland via an unrepeatered subsea crossing. The new segment lands on the coast northeast of Stockholm and in southwest Finland.

Full technical and commercial details remain undisclosed. The company did state one design constraint clearly: the route will share no common landing point, cable, or right-of-way with existing systems connecting Sweden and Finland.

What does the unrepeatered design change?

The system keeps every active component onshore. CEO Svein Arild Ims framed the choice as a resilience measure rather than added engineering risk.

"By taking the system subsea on a fully unrepeatered crossing, with every active component sitting safely onshore, we are not adding complexity to reach Finland; we are removing it," Ims said. "That is precisely the kind of end-to-end resilience the operators building this next wave of AI infrastructure are now asking us for."

Unrepeatered subsea systems place no optical amplifiers on the seabed, which reduces points of failure in the wet plant but limits achievable span length compared with repeatered designs.

Why is Finland the target market?

Ims tied the investment directly to data center growth in Finland. "Finland is fast becoming one of the places where Europe builds and runs its largest AI systems, and compute on that scale is only as useful as the connectivity feeding it," he said.

He also addressed the diversity argument behind the route: "A diverse corridor that stops at the Swedish border isn't a diverse Nordic corridor; it's half a solution."

Who is Midgard Infra?

The company was founded in 2012 and operated as Altibox Carrier until its rebrand this year. It provides international connectivity and data services across the Nordics and Europe. Its owners are Lyse and HitecVision.

Midgard owns and operates subsea cables and terrestrial fiber connecting:

• Norway
• Sweden
• Finland
• Denmark
• the UK

How crowded is the Sweden-Finland corridor?

Several subsea cables already link the two countries:

• GlobalConnect's STO-HEL-One
• Arelion's BSC North Phase 1
• Eastern Light's Sweden-Finland I
• CITIC Telecom International's Baltic Sea Submarine Cable systems

Two more systems are due online next year: GlobalConnect's Mjolner West and Eastern Light's Sweden-Finland II.

Midgard's entry adds a fifth operator to the corridor and, by its own design brief, a route that physically overlaps none of the incumbents' infrastructure — landing points, cable plant, or rights-of-way.