Ericsson has joined forces with the likes of AstraZeneca and Saab to launch a joint venture set to build out AI infrastructure in Sweden.

Teased back in May, following Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang’s visit to southern Sweden, the joint venture aims to provide computing power for local, sovereign AI infrastructure.

Dubbed Sferical AI, the newly formed company will be based in Linköping, a city in southern Sweden that is a little over a two-hour drive from the capital, Stockholm.

The joint venture is owned by Ericsson, AstraZeneca, Saab, SEB bank, and Wallenberg Investments, with Nvidia hardware powering its AI workloads, including two DGX SuperPODs housing the Grace Blackwell GB300 systems – in what would make it one of the largest enterprise AI supercomputers in Sweden once operational.

Jenny Nordlöw, formerly head of operations for the Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering Sciences and an advisor to the Wallenberg family office, will lead the joint venture. The Wallenberg family’s investment arm is also backing Sferical.

“I look forward to, together with our partners, establishing the next generation of AI infrastructure in Sweden and strengthening the competitiveness of Swedish industry,” Nordlöw said.

Alongside Nordlöw, Anders Ynnerman will serve as its executive chairman. He is a professor of scientific visualization in Linköping University’s Department of Science and Technology. Ynnerman also co-founded Sparsit, a startup developing models capable of collecting and analyzing data from sensors, which can be applied to things like computer graphics, video capture, and LiDAR.

Marcus Wallenberg, chairman of Wallenberg Investments, said: “Through this initiative, we create the opportunity for some of Sweden’s leading companies to position themselves at the forefront of the rapid structural transformation of the business landscape brought about by the development and use of AI.”

Erik Ekudden, Ericsson’s CTO, said the telecom giant will work with Sferical AI partners to “develop, deliver, and operate advanced and complex AI to drive Swedish competitiveness – at both individual partner enterprise and national economy levels.”

Sferical AI marks the latest in a growing number of sovereign AI infrastructure projects emerging in Europe amid an increasing demand to build out local offerings to reduce reliance on U.S. hyperscalers.

Efforts like Colosseum in Denmark and Scaleway’s AION consortium are underpinned by a continental-wide push to grow Europe’s AI computing infrastructure.

EU-led projects, such as the AI Continent Action Plan, will invest some €2 billion ($2.3bn) in building specialised AI data centres, or, in Nvidia’s parlance, “AI factories.” There are also plans for some nine new AI supercomputers with a view to tripling the current AI computing capacity of the EuroHPC initiative.

Ericsson’s involvement would see the telecom giant not only boost the AI computing capacity of its native home but also employ its data science and networking expertise to “enable new business models and use cases” for its end users.

Sferical AI is the second joint venture Ericsson has joined in the past year, with the firm a leading founder of the API platform Aduna. The Swedish firm holds half of Aduna’s equity, while the other half is split across a combination of carriers, including Bharti Airtel, Deutsche Telekom, and Orange, among others.