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Some of Sweden’s biggest businesses have teamed up with Nvidia for the launch of the country’s largest AI factory. It’s all part of Nvidia’s apparent move towards world dominance, as it binds not only companies but countries to its technology.
In particular, this announcement follows news of Nvidia building an AI factory in Taiwan, multiple AI factories in Saudi Arabia and its native Canada. None of which should be a surprise, as Nvidia has a stated ambition to transform telcos into sovereign AI factories across the world.
We need to take a breath before listing all of Nvidia’s partners in Sweden. Let’s start with three names you may recognise: pharmaceutical giant AstraZeneca, comms giant Ericsson and defence equipment manufacturer Saab. On the financial side, there’s the bank SEB and investment company Wallenberg Investments.
This consortium will create the AI factory – shorthand for massive data centre-like infrastructure dedicated to AI workloads – in Sweden, which will be run by a separate joint company and offer secure, sovereign AI services to the partners.
The first phase of the factory rollout will involve two Nvidia DGX SuperPOD stacks running on Grace Blackwell GB300 chips. According to the partners, once the factory is up and running, it will be the “largest enterprise AI supercomputer” in Sweden.
It will be used for “compute-heavy AI workloads” including training domain-specific AI models and large-scale inference, the consortium added.
The partners are already planning what they’ll use the AI factory for.
AstraZeneca will harness the infrastructure for developing new drugs, using it for foundation model training, multi-model inference and complex data processing.
Ericsson plans to use the Ai factory to create new business models and boost customer service, while Saab hopes the AI infrastructure will cut time to market for its new defence offerings. SEB said it will use AI to “drive productivity enhancement, power new customer offerings and future proof the bank”.
Alongside the rollout of the factory, Nvidia and the consortium will be setting up an AI Technology Centre to build Sweden’s local AI skills base.
In late 2024, a government-appointed committee charged with identifying how Sweden could increase its use of artificial intelligence published a report describing the country as “rather lagging behind” in AI. In the most recent Global AI Index, Sweden has fallen to 25th in the worldwide rankings, down from 17th place the year before.
The committee’s report also set out over 120 proposals to improve Sweden’s AI standing over the next 10 years, including a call for an investment of 12.5 billion SEK (around £1 billion/$1.3 billion) in the sector.
According to analysts Cognitive Market Research, Sweden accounts for 5.6% of the global AI market, worth around $29 billion in 2023.
One final note – if you click on any of the three links below, you’ll see that this is part of a worldwide investment by Nvidia. It’s not only building AI factories but also walls against competitors AMD and Intel.
