A Helsinki lab barely a year old, bankrolled by Nokia and the Finnish state, is now writing battlefield software with two defence ministries. The technology matters less than who controls it.
On the last day of June, officials from Finland’s Ministry of Defence, the Estonian Defence Forces, and a Helsinki AI lab founded only last year signed a document that commits none of them to spend a single euro. The letter of intent contains no financial commitments at all, a fact the Finnish Defence Forces stated plainly in its own announcement.
It is, on paper, one of the least consequential things a defence ministry can put its name to. It is also, in the current European mood, one of the more revealing.
The letter ties the Finnish Defence Forces’ AI Centre of Excellence to Estonia’s Force Transformation Command, with NestAI as the industrial partner, and sets out a framework for knowledge sharing, joint development, training, and technical cooperation. Procurement is not mentioned. What is being negotiated here is not a contract but a habit.
The 💜 of EU techThe latest rumblings from the EU tech scene, a story from our wise ol' founder Boris, and some questionable AI art. It's free, every week, in your inbox. Sign up now!NestAI itself is scarcely older than the agreement. Founded in 2025, it now employs close to 200 engineers and scientists, and in November it raised €100m from Nokia and Tesi, the Finnish state investment company. That is enough to make it one of the better-capitalised physical-AI labs on the continent before most people outside Helsinki had heard of it.
