Lithuania is building a huge tech campus — Europe's largest — in the capital of Vilnius, as it looks to become the new tech capital of the Baltics.
Built by Tech Zity, an infrastructure project in Lithuania, the campus is a 100 million euro ($109.6 million) development that will span 55,000 square meters and house 5,000 digital workers, the firm said Friday.
That would make it larger than Paris' Station F, currently the largest startup campus in all of Europe.
The development is inspired by British renovation projects such as the Battersea Power Station and Tate Modern art gallery.
Tech Zity developers will renovate a number of sewing factories in a disused industrial space in Vilnius' New Town, maintaining factory-like office floors with ceiling heights of at least 7 meters.
The project aims to encourage Vilnius' tech workers to return to the office after the pandemic. Tech companies have increasingly been pushing for their employees to go back to the office, in a reversal from the pandemic-era trend of working from home.
Lithuania's tech ecosystem has grown dramatically over the past decade, Darius Zakaitis, Tech Zity's founder, told CNBC.
«When I started 30 years ago, there were 200 people in the Lithuanian tech ecosystem,» Zakaitis said. «Now it's 18,000 people.»
«It's a result of 10 years of active young people building new companies every day. Some of them are very successful,» he said.
«Lithuanians are very productive, very results-oriented, highly-skilled guys, very aggressively building their own companies,» he added.
Vilnius, the second-largest city in the Baltic states, is home to a burgeoning tech industry, including major unicorns such as used clothing retailer Vinted and cybersecurity firm Nord.
Nord has
Read more on cnbc.com