Finland's digital moonshot: The plans to win the 6G, metaverse and quantum races

by ROP

Business Finland's "Renew and Grow Through Digitalization and Data Economy" summit unfolded like a relay in which each speaker tightened the same storyline: Finland knows how to engineer the future, but must learn to sell it at the speed the world now demands.

The morning lights dimmed and Pekka Sivonen, Co-founder and Partner, Extended Runway Ltd, strode onstage, a slide of the Yucatán meteor filling the screen. Generative AI, he warned, will strike humanity with comparable force. His remedy was unapologetically Finnish: build the networks, optics and encryption that make the shockwave an opportunity.

"The effects of generative artificial intelligence on humanity—on our lives and our activities—have truly been of the same magnitude. It’s not meant to frighten us, but to wake us up"
Pekka Sivonen, Co-founder and Partner, Extended Runway Ltd,

He pointed north and highlighted Oulu’s multimillion-euro 6G flagship program, a testbed designed to turn promises—remote surgery, autonomous traffic, battlefield situational awareness—into low-latency reality.

"In Oulu we have a €272 million flagship program with 300 international partners. If you want to leverage network technology and the business opportunities it offers, Finland is not a bad place," said the co-founder and partner of Extended Runway Ltd.

Then came the quantum twist: every encrypted secret online is already stored, waiting for qubits to crack it. The antidote, Sivonen argued, is to bake homomorphic encryption into Finland’s next-gen networks, even while those same qubits slash the €2 billion price tag of drug discovery in Turku’s pharma labs.

"When quantum computing becomes widespread, it will also transform medicine. We’ll be able to simulate how drugs behave. In this regard, Turku will play a very important role," he emphasized.

6G Super nopea Entreprenerd Media

The data-economy paradox

Miika Kataikko, from the Ministry of Employment and the Economy, picked up the thread by diagnosing Finland's "data-economy paradox": world-beating digital infrastructure, eighteen years of sputtering productivity. He dissected the gap between data ownership, data operations and—most elusive—data monetisation. Unless every actor in the value chain can show a path to profit, he said, the structure collapses.

Kataikko’s mantra—awareness, internal change, external collaboration, growth—became the day’s running score.

Otto Vainio, Business Finland’s EU-funding strategist, provided the cash map. He unveiled Data, Datatalous ja Kasvu, a pragmatic playbook guiding companies from first pilot to revenue-sharing service.

Interest is already outpacing bureaucracy: four hundred firms signalled intent in the recent Turku Concept call, two hundred filed full applications, about one hundred projects are live. Vainio framed the backlog as proof that Finnish founders can move at Silicon-Valley velocity—if the money lands on time.

"We have to go further. We need to connect data with different contexts and other materials so we can create large-scale value. That is the heart of strategic data use," Vainio emphasized.

"You might think data is similar to oil, but there are also many differences. The main one, of course, is that data is—in a sense—a renewable resource. We can generate it, use it, and reuse it. No one truly owns data outright; instead, there are usage rights defined within new infrastructures, such as the blockchain-based systems Pekka mentioned earlier."
Otto Vainio, added.

Heavy industry’s software moment

If policy talk felt abstract, Mikko Valtee, Strategic Research and Innovation Manager from Sandvik Mining and Rock Solutions dragged the room a kilometre underground. From Turku, the enterprise has shipped fully autonomous loaders since 2004; more than a thousand now rumble through tunnels worldwide. The next frontier, he said, is turning machines into perpetual data engines.

Sandvik’s "battery-as-a-service" model keeps the packs on its own balance sheet, locking customers into predictive-maintenance subscriptions. Seventy per cent of revenue already comes after the machine is sold. The target—eight-per-cent compound growth for the next five years—depends on extending data visibility from mine-planning software to individual battery cells.

"What I mean—and I see it this way from our management’s perspective as well, with which I fully agree—is that we’re in the midst of a transition. We’re moving away from the traditional focus on electrifying and automating machines and shifting toward optimization through data, analytics, and process-level solutions. That will be the focus over the next five to ten years: not just making the hardware better, but integrating intelligence and added value through data," Mikko Valtee told the audience.

Timo Sorsa, Head of GenAI, Business Finland, zoomed back to the national canvas. Business Finland has committed €36 million to AI projects this year, much of it through the oversubscribed Turku pipeline.

"In this era of artificial intelligence, I personally see competitive advantage taking on a new dimension. The ways in which that advantage is built can be very different from before," Sorsa said.

"In many cases there’s likely to be a strong first-mover advantage: whoever launches a solution first—especially if it includes a data-feedback loop that lets the AI model improve with use—secures a clear edge."
Timo Sorsa detailed.

"But on the other hand," the Head of GenAI at Business Finland stressed, "in many use cases the rollout and adoption of AI tools has accelerated so much that fast followers can also catch up quickly. Nowadays, if someone launches something interesting, a competitor can replicate it in weeks or months, not years."

Kimmo Laine, Managing Director at Milrem Robotics Oy, closed the loop with wartime urgency. Milrem Robotics’ tracked "Veikko" vehicles evacuate wounded soldiers and haul ammunition from Arctic snowfields to desert ranges, operating in nineteen countries and combat-tested in Ukraine.

Defence ministries that once took twelve years to approve a platform now want upgrades in twelve months. The question, Laine said, is whether Finland’s industrial machine can scale to that tempo before larger rivals pivot.

"In practice, what these units do is evacuate—specifically medical evacuations, or what’s known as casualty evacuation (cas-evac). They transport the wounded from the zero line, from gray zones, to the rear. On the return trip, they bring supplies: drinks, ammunition, water—whatever is needed," he noted.

The race against the slow burn

By dusk the narrative felt seamless. Sivonen’s meteor framed the stakes, Kataikko named the bottleneck, Vainio opened the funding sluice, Valtee proved deep-tech can print money, Sorsa warned the clock is ticking and Laine showed what happens when technology meets real-world demand ahead of schedule.

Finland’s engineers have written the future’s source code; what remains is to ship it before the rest of the planet hits compile.