Sweden builds AI metal while Europe watches

GPUs are the new oil rigs. Sweden just struck a gusher. FuriosaAI, the Seoul-based chip startup, confirmed on August 5 it will deploy its Warboy accelerators in a new AI data center in Sweden. No exact location yet, but the project is tied to the Boden Type Data Center campus, already home to 1.5 GW of hyperscale capacity. Furiosa’s Warboy delivers 1.5x the H100’s performance per watt on transformer workloads, according to MLPerf v4.0 benchmarks released last month. The deal includes a joint R&D lab with RISE, Sweden’s state-owned research institute, focused on liquid cooling and power recycling for sub-1.1 PUE. Sweden is not waiting for Silicon Valley’s playbook. The government’s “AI for Sweden 2.0” strategy, launched in March, earmarks €1.2 Bn for domestic compute clusters by 2028. Stockholm Exergi is repurposing a retired biomass plant in Hammarby to feed 200 MW of district-heating capacity directly into a new data center campus. The first phase, 50 MW, is slated for Q2 2027. Meanwhile, Vattenfall is testing hydrogen-ready turbines at the Luleå site, aiming for zero-carbon backup power by 2029. Why this matters for Nordic builders. The metal is here, the power is cheap, and the talent is sticky. Sweden’s startup density is 2.3x the EU average, yet only 12% of Series B rounds in 2025 went to US acquirers, down from 31% in 2022. The bottleneck is no longer capital; it is colocation. Furiosa’s move gives local teams a home-grown alternative to NVIDIA’s lead times and US export controls. Expect Norwegian drone startups, Finnish industrial AI shops, and Danish health-tech scale-ups to follow the compute trail north. Action this week. Map your 2027 training runs to Boden or Luleå. RISE is offering free benchmark slots for Nordic teams until September 30. Submit a 2-page use case to secure a Warboy node and a 90% discount on power for the first 1000 GPU-hours. If you are running inference, ask for the “Zlatan tier”: 50% off inference-as-a-service for models under 7B parameters, no questions asked.

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12 AugInfra & computereaches nearby