Finland Picks Helsinki Shipyard to Build the Icebreaker Aino

The Finnish Transport Infrastructure Agency has selected Helsinki Shipyard to build the first of its new generation of icebreakers, following a shipyard competition. The vessel replaces Voima, the world's oldest active icebreaker, which Finland commissioned in 1954.

The agency completed the design process in early 2025. The requirement was a ship able to handle harsh Finnish conditions and support winter navigation in the Baltic and along the Finnish coast, with design solutions that account for changed and more variable winter conditions and for the assistance needs of merchant ships. The new vessel is also designed to move more smoothly in open water, which the agency expects to encounter more often in the decades ahead as the climate shifts.

The ship will be named Aino. It is a B+ class icebreaker capable of opening a 25-metre channel, measuring 96 metres in length and 24 metres in beam, with 10.5 megawatts of propulsion power. Its performance rests on a modern hull form and a propulsion configuration combining straight shaft lines with a bow-mounted azimuthing thruster. It is smaller than the heavy A class vessels but larger than a standard medium-sized B class unit.

Elisa Mikkolainen, director of water traffic at the agency, said the ship has undergone careful conceptualisation, design and ice model tests, and that difficult ice conditions are not going away and icebreakers will be needed in future as well.

Construction begins in 2027, with completion scheduled for September 2029. The project was awarded EUR 42 million in support from the European Union in recognition of the vessel's role in Baltic navigation, making it the largest transport support ever awarded to Finland.

Helsinki Shipyard points to a long record in the type. It says every icebreaker built in Finland in the past 25 years, and around half of the icebreakers currently in operation worldwide, were built in Helsinki, including the Voima that Aino will replace.

The yard was acquired in late 2023 by the British-owned marine industrial group Inocea and integrated alongside Canada's Davie and the newly launched Davie Defense in the United States. Tens of millions of euros have gone into the operation since, the most significant upgrade being an intermediate gate in the yard's 280-metre dry dock, which allows it to run more projects in parallel.

That capacity is already committed elsewhere. The yard began work in 2025 on Canada's Polar Max, which will be among the heaviest icebreakers ever built, with steel cutting at Sata Shipbuilding in August 2025 and assembly starting in Helsinki in May 2026. The hull is being built in Finland before moving to Davie Shipbuilding in Quebec for completion in 2030. Steel cutting for the new U.S. Arctic Security Cutter began at Sata Shipbuilding in June, with two vessels to be built in Helsinki and the first due for delivery in 2028.