The incident that makes the AI giants tremble

March 3, 2026
by Björn Jeffery
SvD Näringsliv

This analysis was first published in SvD Näringsliv, in Swedish, on March 3rd, 2026. This piece was translated from Swedish by Claude. Some phrasing may differ from a human translation.

The Gulf states’ billions have become a financial safety net for AI giants like OpenAI, Anthropic, and Nvidia. Now the conflict in Iran is shaking the stability on which these investments rest. If the money freezes, the effects could be brutal.

On Sunday, an unusual update appeared from AWS, Amazon’s cloud services. Ordinarily, entries in the “service status” category are brief, dry notices about when a company’s services are temporarily not functioning as they should.

This time it was something else entirely.

An AWS data centre in the United Arab Emirates “was struck by an object that hit the data centre, creating sparks and fire.” The object in question was a drone from Iran.

A single fire can be resolved. But as a signal about conditions in the region — and its enormous AI investments — many are likely to be worried.

One of the most stable financiers of the AI boom is now suddenly trembling.

In the spring of 2025, Donald Trump and the Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman stood at the front of a large group photograph. It was an investor meeting in Riyadh where the US and Saudi Arabia met to do business.

Standing in the row behind Trump was one of the main protagonists: Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia. He was responsible for one of the really big deals. In a first consignment, 18,000 Nvidia chips were shipped to Saudi Arabia to launch a new, enormous data centre. Hundreds of thousands more chips will follow over the next five years in a deal estimated to be worth over 180 billion kronor.

The region’s AI ambitions extend substantially further — and wider — than that, however.

The Abu Dhabi fund MGX is a co-owner of both OpenAI and xAI as well as Anthropic. Together with Blackrock, they bought the American data centre company Aligned Data Centers for around 365 billion kronor. MGX also has connections to European AI ventures, being part of a consortium that will invest at least 280 billion kronor in building data centres in France.

The corresponding funds in Qatar and Saudi Arabia have also invested hundreds of billions of kronor in total across both data centres and individual companies. Elon Musk’s xAI announced that it received money from Saudi Arabia as recently as a couple of weeks ago. The list of all AI-related commitments could be made very long indeed.

Through investments, acquisitions, and partnerships, the Gulf states have become the global AI industry’s financial safety net. The question many will now be asking is how reliable that safety net will be in the period ahead. Can one trust that the money that has been promised will materialise? What does appetite for investment look like going forward?

A large portion of the sums mentioned above have not yet been paid — they are statements of intent and plans stretching over many years. This means the risks are deferred to the future, which creates uncertainty.

Neither capital nor ambitions need to change for disorder to emerge. A temporary moment of doubt is enough to create a problem. Something as simple as project delays strikes directly at companies that may have made themselves dependent on them.

Worse still — it can take a long time to normalise. A prolonged conflict in the region would, for obvious reasons, also be able to shift focus away from long-term AI investments towards more pressing matters closer to home.

The dependence on Gulf state money appears as a significant vulnerability for the tech industry. The many data centres to be built require billions upon billions to get off the ground. If financing for these is delayed — or, in the worst case, cancelled — a cascade of consequences could quickly follow.

Supply chains break down, permits need to be reapplied for, questions of liability need to be resolved. There are many companies whose valuations — and promises to the market — depend on these projects. Were the financing to fall through, many companies could find themselves in acute financial crisis. Protracted projects delay both the construction of data centres and the AI companies seeking to purchase their capacity. It could become very expensive, very quickly.

It began with a data centre that was fired upon. But it rapidly became a wake-up call for the entire industry.

The billion-dollar windfall from the missed mega-deal

February 27, 2026
by Björn Jeffery
SvD Näringsliv

This analysis was first published in SvD Näringsliv, in Swedish, on February 27th, 2026. This piece was translated from Swedish by Claude. Some phrasing may differ from a human translation.

Netflix gives up on buying HBO and its parent company Warner Bros Discovery. A new major streaming giant is being created in the US instead. But despite the loss, Netflix comes out the winner.

Sometimes you win in business even when it looks like you’re losing.

Netflix is experiencing that right now.

Late on Thursday came the news that the Warner Bros Discovery board had changed its mind. In December, they agreed to sell the digital parts of their company — including HBO — to Netflix for 83 billion dollars, including debt. A good deal for all involved, many analysts thought.

One party was, however, very unhappy: Paramount Skydance, the other bidder in the process. And they made clear to Warner Bros from the start that the match was far from over.

They revised the bid structure. Changed the terms. Increased the amount of money.

In the end, it was enough for the Warner Bros board to switch sides and sell to Paramount instead. But Netflix leaves the deal as a winner — in several ways.

When making deals of this calibre, there are many things that can go wrong. All three companies are listed on the stock exchange, which means one must follow all applicable rules. Get enough unhappy shareholders and the process alone can become messy and take a long time.

After that, the deal must be approved by regulators. That too can drag on, and does not always end up as planned. The purpose is for authorities to ensure that competition in the market functions as it should. In this particular case, however, it is likely to proceed smoothly, as Paramount stands close to the Trump administration.

To give both parties some certainty, a so-called “breakup fee” is usually set. This means that if either party pulls out, or if the deal is not approved, one party must pay the other a large sum of money. It functions like an insurance policy.

As a consolation prize for Warner Bros pulling out, Netflix will therefore receive 2.8 billion dollars — around 25 billion kronor — as a breakup fee. Not bad for a few months of negotiation. And to make it even better for Netflix — as part of the negotiation, Paramount Skydance has agreed to pay the penalty out of its own pocket.

The question one might ask is why it is so important for Paramount to own Warner Bros? To such a degree that they are now paying 31 dollars per share for a company that was trading at around 12 dollars last autumn?

It is primarily about company size, and how quickly one can get to becoming a giant player.

The biggest in the streaming category is Netflix. That is the company everyone else is chasing right now. And after a market that for several years consisted of a myriad of small streaming services, the prevailing strategy is the opposite. There should be few — and large — services.

Netflix cannot be bought, and nor can Disney+, Apple TV+, or Amazon Prime Video. The list of possible acquisitions if you want to become a new giant is very short. And right at the top of it was Warner Bros Discovery. That is why this purchase became so important for David Ellison, CEO of Paramount Skydance. How else could he compete with the other massive rivals?

And so it became expensive. Paramount Skydance is a company that loses money and already has large debts following its first major acquisition — in the summer of 2024, they bought the company they subsequently took their name from: Paramount.

On the debt side, things are getting substantially worse for Paramount Skydance. They are buying Warner Bros with money they do not have. Even before this deal, they had around 124 billion kronor in debt. And now they need to cough up a further 1,000 billion kronor to pay for the new deal. All while the underlying business is bleeding.

That headache is David Ellison’s to solve going forward. Perhaps with the help of his father, Larry Ellison, the founder of the database company Oracle — and one of the world’s wealthiest people.

Netflix emerges from this as a winner in many ways. As noted, they receive a large bag of money without really having to do very much. They now have a larger competitor in Paramount Skydance, but one that has almost certainly overpaid for its new asset. The money Netflix didn’t have to spend can be invested elsewhere.

The final bonus was delivered yesterday, after the market had closed. When it emerged that Netflix had lost the deal over Warner Bros, their share price jumped more than seven percent immediately. Netflix’s market capitalisation thereby increased by 225 billion kronor on the strength of that news alone.

Sometimes, as noted, it is good to lose deals, after all.

We should talk more about how AI uses us

February 26, 2026
by Björn Jeffery
SvD Näringsliv

This analysis was first published in SvD Näringsliv, in Swedish, on February 26th, 2026. This piece was translated from Swedish by Claude. Some phrasing may differ from a human translation.

AI is not quite as artificial as many believe. A new investigation by SvD reveals how private moments are shared with office workers in Africa, whose job it is to train AI systems. Invisible to the user — but absolutely crucial to the company.

We talk a lot about how we can use AI.

Perhaps we should talk more about how AI uses us.

In an investigative report by SvD and GP, we get a glimpse into what jobs in what is called “Silicon Savannah” look like. At a subcontractor for Meta, people in Nairobi sit and watch video clips. Their job is to tell AI systems what can be seen in the footage.

It is called “annotating data,” but it can be explained more simply than that. It is when a human helps AI understand what is happening on screen, in the hope that one day it will be able to manage on its own. But before we get to that point, it needs help — drawn boxes with explanations. And it needs the raw material — the data — to get there.

In this case, the video clips come from Meta Ray-Ban — a pair of glasses equipped with a camera and microphone. With them, the company obtains a type of data that is hard to come by otherwise. If someone went around filming you on the street, you would probably ask what they were doing. You would likely speak up and ask them to stop. But when it happens through a pair of glasses, it is not as obvious what is going on.

For AI systems to get better, they use the data we produce.

There are plenty of cases where this exchange of data can be beneficial for both parties. Having one’s genetics reviewed can help identify health risks. In some cases, it can be the missing piece for understanding why one feels the way one does.

A considerably more trivial exchange occurs every time you go on Facebook or Instagram. They know who you are, and they can indirectly sell that information to advertisers who want to reach you. What you get back is an entertaining service with amusement. You have agreed that they may do this — otherwise you would not be able to use these services. But you probably do not think about it every time you use them.

While the festive photos people share of themselves on Instagram are a conscious choice, the cameras on Meta Ray-Ban face the other direction.

The report describes how workers in Nairobi are required to watch a long series of private events — sex, toilet visits, intimate conversations — as part of the job. Situations that could not reasonably have been intended to be shared with anyone, yet ended up on a screen in Kenya. Did those who were filmed even know this could happen?

It is said that you cannot walk many metres in London without being captured by one of the roughly one million surveillance cameras in the city. Signs inform people of this, but it cannot be opted out of even if one wanted to. It is the price you pay for moving around the city. The phenomenon is therefore not unfamiliar, but now it can happen anywhere. In changing rooms, at a restaurant — or in your own home.

The purpose also differs. One can certainly have opinions about the surveillance cameras that exist, but the purpose is to be able to resolve, and hopefully prevent, various types of crime. Now we are putting cameras on our faces to let an AI service tell us what we could reasonably already see for ourselves.

For the time being, artificial intelligence is not always entirely artificial, and not always particularly intelligent either. There are thousands of people sitting in offices in Africa whose job it is to tell these systems what the difference is between an armchair and a sofa. They train AI systems to become smarter.

The human component in all of this work is almost invisible to the user, but is absolutely crucial. As a result of this, a great deal of information and data about you ends up on the screen in front of individuals who watch, assess, and review what you do. They are working. But not for you — for AI.

The work was halted after SvD’s and GP’s investigation. Now 1,108 workers have been given notice of redundancy, according to multiple international media outlets.

In an office building on Mombasa Road in Nairobi, thousands of the AI revolution’s heavy labourers work. People who are supposed to teach the systems to understand what is captured in images.

They are called “annotators” and their work is invisible to the end user. The company they work for is called Sama. Until recently, its major client was the tech giant Meta, which is investing heavily in camera-equipped glasses powered by AI technology.

SvD and GP were able to reveal in February that the annotators had been exposed to a great deal of private material in the course of their work. It could involve sex, naked people, and toilet visits filmed via Meta’s glasses.

The consequences for the tech giant have been severe. Four data protection authorities on two continents have acted against Meta by demanding answers from the company or opening their own investigations.

Earlier this week it became clear that Meta is completely halting its collaboration with Sama in Kenya after investigating the claims that emerged in the investigation.

Now the consequences are falling on Sama’s employees. 1,108 people risk losing their jobs as a direct result of Meta’s decision, the company states in a written announcement.

“We are aware of the significant impact this has on the team and the local community. We are actively working to support the affected employees with care and respect,” the company writes.

The news has been reported by, among others, NTV Kenya, The Guardian, and AP. Sama states in its announcement that negotiations with Meta have been ongoing, but that the talks have been fruitless.

Kauna Malgwi, who previously worked for Sama, tells The Guardian that the layoffs show how the AI industry works.

“The power lies with the big tech companies and the risk is pushed downwards and affects the workers, often in the Global South, who have the least protection.”

Meta has stated that the company has investigated the claims in SvD’s and GP’s investigation.

“Last month we paused our work with Sama while we investigated these claims. We take them very seriously. Images and videos are private to users. People review AI content to improve product performance, for which we get clear user consent. We have also decided to end our collaboration with Sama as they do not live up to our standards.”

Meta has not, however, responded to follow-up questions about what its investigation has found. Sama has stated that the company “adheres to strict standards of data security and privacy, including GDPR and CCPA.”

After SvD’s and GP’s investigation, the Facebook owner is ending its collaboration with the annotation company Sama in Kenya. At the same time, employees speak of retaliation, insecure working conditions, and wages not paid on time.

According to multiple sources, after the work stoppage employees have been going to work without receiving any tasks. Instead, they have been sitting in front of their computers refreshing the screen roughly every eight minutes to show that they are present.

“Nobody is working on annotation in these projects anymore,” says one source.

After the investigation, employees at Sama report that conditions have worsened and that security at the company has been tightened further, and that they have attempted to track down sources.

Eric Mugendi, editor-in-chief of Kenya-based Africa Uncensored, one of East Africa’s largest investigative journalism outlets, says that the tactic of trying to identify sources is common in the country.

“After revelations like these, it is common for pressure on employees to increase, with stricter controls, and then they try to trace who has spoken to the media,” he says.

The slightest rumour can be grounds for dismissal, he adds.

“If one person does something, everyone can be punished. And if you hear something — even if it is just a rumour without concrete evidence — it can still be used against you.”

SvD and GP put questions to Sama about their view of the claims regarding worsened working conditions and the tracking of sources, and about Meta pausing its work with Sama. Representatives for Sama write in a comment that they do not comment on specific client relationships.

Sama also writes that it takes data security very seriously. “We strongly dispute several of the allegations and emphasise that we adhere to strict standards of data security and privacy, including GDPR and CCPA. We are equally committed to the wellbeing and fair treatment of our employees,” Sama writes, adding: “As a company, we do not monitor or track employees with the aim of identifying individuals who may have spoken to the media, and we reject any insinuations of retaliation.”

World-class is not reached with fluffy words

February 23, 2026
by Björn Jeffery
SvD Näringsliv

This analysis was first published in SvD Näringsliv, in Swedish, on February 23rd, 2026. This piece was translated from Swedish by Claude. Some phrasing may differ from a human translation.

Sweden’s new AI strategy is long on words and short on numbers. The government prioritises talking about how important AI is rather than showing it in action. To reach the top of the world, something absolutely crucial is missing.

So it finally arrived — Sweden’s AI strategy.

It was released on a Friday afternoon — hardly prime time for major announcements. That is rather when you tend to reveal things you would prefer people to forget, or at least miss. Once you read the strategy, the timing becomes easier to understand.

There are no bombshells here. It is 24 airily written pages, full of self-evident truths. For the concrete goals that are mentioned, a plan — and a budget — for how to achieve them is usually absent.

There are also 12 pages of action plan, in which “action” is a generously applied term.

The following quote is telling: “The Government has commissioned an inquiry into privacy-preserving methods for a more data-driven and collaborative public administration.” Sure, an inquiry is some kind of action. But it was probably not what many were waiting for when the strategy was finally presented — a year after it was supposed to have come into force.

Strategy is, as we know, a vague concept. One way to assess a strategy is therefore to consider whether there is anyone who could say the opposite of what is being claimed. Only then have you distinguished yourself.

We can test the exercise on our country’s new AI strategy. Here are some quotes from it. Would any country actually say the opposite — aiming for worse data management, for example?

Another remarkable thing is that there is barely a single figure mentioned in the material. In the strategy itself there are none at all, and in the action plan there are a few individual items but without an overall budget framework. Vinnova is investing 570 million kronor in “Advanced digitalisation” and 118 million kronor is to be invested over four years in expanding fibre-optic cables.

We have to go to an opinion piece from the Tidö coalition parties from September 2025 to see what they actually planned to allocate. There it states that 479 million kronor will be invested in 2026, and around 500 million kronor per year from 2027–2030. Rounded up, that comes to around 2.5 billion kronor.

That might sound like a lot of money, so let us put this figure in perspective. 2.5 billion kronor is approximately 0.9 percent of the amount invested in AI company Anthropic in its most recent funding round a few weeks ago. And that is talking about just one single American company.

We can compare with other countries too. The United Kingdom is investing roughly 10 times more than Sweden. Canada even more — around 30 billion kronor. Even tiny Singapore, with half Sweden’s population, is investing around 7 billion kronor.

There are other resources besides money, however, and here there are some bright spots.

Together with the Wallenberg Foundations, a Swedish language model is to be developed. An interesting initiative, particularly from the perspective of digital sovereignty.

The model is to safeguard the Swedish language, our culture, and our norms. The work is being done together with writers, media companies, and publishers to ensure copyright remains intact. That might sound like a matter of course, but it is substantially more than the American equivalents have managed — or even attempted to achieve.

The Swedish language model is an ambitious project that draws on WASP, Sweden’s largest individual research programme, which is largely financed by the Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation. Here the Swedish state will contribute data — a welcome and encouraging move. The Royal Library is also involved — an excellent partner for this.

Another area that sounds promising is the billions that could potentially be saved annually by making the public sector more efficient with AI. The ambition to become the best in the world at using AI in public administration is admirable. Here there are resources that could be freed up for more important things than administration.

Finally, let us return to the opening of the strategy, in its very first sentence: “Sweden shall be among the ten leading nations in artificial intelligence (AI) in the world.” Beyond the fact that it does not specify exactly how we will measure this, further questions are laid bare.

What happens to this ambition after this year’s general election? Who will pay for it all? Do we as a country have a clear timetable for this work?

There are no clear answers — either in the strategy or in the action plan. Instead we got yet another paper product full of self-evident truths.

The LinkedIn disease has hit Swedish tech

February 19, 2026
by Björn Jeffery
SvD Näringsliv

This analysis was first published in SvD Näringsliv, in Swedish, on February 19th, 2026. This piece was translated from Swedish by Claude. Some phrasing may differ from a human translation.

Nothing but cheerleading and not a critical word uttered. The Swedish tech industry has been struck by the disease of “LinkedInism.” The healthy criticism — and what people actually think — is found in private emails and chat groups.

Rocket emojis, cheers, and paragraphs with far too many blank lines. On LinkedIn, unbridled enthusiasm reigns. Banal observations are packaged as major industry insights.

From being a collection of CVs, LinkedIn has come to be a somewhat unexpected gathering place for the Swedish tech industry. The tone is encouraging: let’s go! Or at least that is how it sounds in public.

When I read private emails and chat groups involving participants from the tech industry, criticism and frustration are often aired.

People talk about entrepreneurs who exaggerate — or even lie. Investors who boast about holdings they barely had anything to do with. But few think it is worth the risk of saying the same things publicly. It resembles the Emperor’s New Clothes more than Silicon Valley: the flaws are visible, but nobody wants to say so out loud.

At last week’s Techarena, people spoke about the area around San Francisco and what is called a “pay it forward” culture. Several on stage stated that Sweden has learned from this — helping others in the ecosystem without immediately getting anything in return. A kind of entrepreneurial karma, if you will. The idea is that when money, insights, and contacts flow between people, the value increases for everyone involved.

There is something in this. Having helpful people around you makes it easier when you want to start new companies. Having newly wealthy friends and acquaintances is an advantage when you need your first round of financing.

But it seems a misunderstanding has also emerged here. This rose-tinted picture of Silicon Valley — or Stockholm for that matter — is not complete. Just because people help each other with introductions and angel investments does not mean the ecosystem benefits most from an absence of criticism. Pointing out risks and weaknesses is something that strengthens, not undermines.

The Swedish tech industry appears to have been struck by the disease of “LinkedInism” — an excessively positive and uncritical stance. Behind the scenes things sound partly different. But the social risk of writing this for public consumption is too great, according to those I have spoken with. And what you might gain from it is far too little.

We are not talking about publishing online hate speech or plain complaining here. It is possible to maintain healthy scepticism about the exaggerations and “fake it until you make it” attitudes within startup culture without ending up there.

If you believe that nothing but positive thinking is the decisive factor in Silicon Valley, you need look no further than a book by its high priest — PayPal founder Peter Thiel. It was not cheering and helpfulness that shaped the companies he was involved in building — Facebook, for example, where he was among the first investors.

In his book “Zero to One,” Thiel describes how a company should try to circumvent all possibility of competition and establish its own monopoly. Only then is profitability good enough to focus on things other than fighting over shrinking margins — which, according to Thiel, is the inevitable outcome of competition.

One example he cites is Google — now judged to be precisely that: a monopoly. Google can afford to dabble in other things precisely because its monopoly on the search advertising market ensures the money keeps rolling in anyway. The outward image is of an innovative company constantly inventing new products and services. On the inside it is a money press operating without any significant competition. Having a monopoly is not just profitable — it is actively desirable, writes Thiel.

The idea that all companies in Silicon Valley are happy, helpful, and collaborative is therefore a myth. If you visit, you might get that impression, perhaps — being bussed around among Swedish employees at tech companies who receive guests in bare conference rooms. That is one image. But it does not say much about how these companies actually operate.

The Swedish tech industry would benefit from reading a few more books about how Silicon Valley actually works. The aforementioned “Zero to One” by Peter Thiel, “Power” by Tim Higgins, and “Careless People” by Sarah Wynn-Williams would be a start. Apple and Meta — two of the companies the books deal with — did not become successful because they encouraged each other on LinkedIn and sent introductions to happy and receptive people. To a large extent they got there through razor-sharp, hard-nosed business sense.

Criticism is a natural and welcome part of that. If the Swedish tech industry wants to try to emulate Silicon Valley, that is where it should start.

They’re selling a story that isn’t true

February 13, 2026
by Björn Jeffery
SvD Näringsliv

This analysis was first published in SvD Näringsliv, in Swedish, on February 13th, 2026. This piece was translated from Swedish by Claude. Some phrasing may differ from a human translation.

The headline speakers were Zlatan and Boris Johnson. What do they know about Swedish tech, one might wonder? When thousands of participants visited Techarena in Stockholm, it was more about marketing an exaggerated image of Sweden.

An inflatable unicorn spins a wheel at a major bank’s stand. Next to it, a property company is offering soft ice cream.

We are in Solna, at Techarena. Here all other industries are supposed to be able to meet the Swedish tech miracle. But something is missing.

Everyone is present at Strawberry Arena — except the main protagonists: the big tech companies.

The taxi queue winds up the hill outside the arena. Ministers and Swedish entrepreneurs glide in, take part in a brief panel discussion about how important Sweden’s and Europe’s tech future is, and then straight back out to the taxi again. On the arena floor, they are nowhere to be found — with a few isolated exceptions.

Most telling was the closing interview on Wednesday when the audience was asked to welcome Max Junestrand, CEO of the hyped Swedish AI company Legora, to the stage. Or rather — we welcomed him to the screen. He was, it turned out, in San Francisco acquiring more American customers.

So there we sat, in Solna, listening to a Swede in the US talk about how great it was to run a company from Stockholm.

The programme for Techarena is odd, to say the least. The headline name is Zlatan — inexplicably. Boris Johnson, former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, does not seem to know why he is here. He talks mostly about how Covid could have been handled differently.

Immediately after Johnson, on the same stage, we get a little closer to something relevant.

It is a panel discussion about how Nordic founders can compete in a global market. The three panellists are somewhat oddly chosen, given that none of them have expanded their companies further than Western Europe.

But then comes a comment from the panel that explains why we have all gathered here on the exhibition floor.

Fredrik Hjelm, CEO of Voi, proclaims that “marketing is back!” (We speak only English at this conference, naturally.) We are here to absorb the marketing. And what is being sold is Tech Sweden.

The message is very clear from the politicians and entrepreneurs on stage. Europe is strong in global competition. Sweden in particular. The only thing standing in the way of our world domination appears to be EU regulations that frustrate the participants.

The idea of dismantling government laws to unleash growth and innovation is a familiar one. It all sounds a little libertarian. The irony of this argument seems to be lost on the room — namely that it is the state that has paid for parts of this very gathering.

Names like Business Sweden, the state research institute Rise, Vinnova, and the Swedish Export Credit Agency stand in their stands right in the middle of the exhibition floor. It is their money that makes it possible for all of us to be here.

In panel discussions we are told about Americans moving to Sweden because our quality of life is so high — that here it is possible to combine a successful career with family life. But how many people are we actually talking about?

According to Statistics Sweden, a total of 1,761 Americans moved to Sweden during 2024 — or a little more than half as many as came from Poland or Syria. Far from all of them work in tech. We are not talking about any American tech invasion.

But yes, you can find a few of the big tech companies too.

Meta has a small stand where they want to show off their smart glasses. AI company Anthropic sent a salesperson who explained how he organises his wine cellar with AI. A Swedish policy director at TikTok sat dutifully on a panel about disinformation.

The vast majority of major tech companies — neither Swedish nor foreign — are not here, however. Spotify and Klarna have offices 20 minutes from the arena but were not visible. Nor companies like Apple or Tesla. This is clearly not a priority for them. Where companies are present at all, they have sent the sales staff, not the heavy hitters.

Perhaps that says something about Sweden as a tech nation.

Why Spotify can charge more

February 10, 2026
by Björn Jeffery
SvD Näringsliv

This analysis was first published in SvD Näringsliv, in Swedish, on February 10th, 2026. This piece was translated from Swedish by Claude. Some phrasing may differ from a human translation.

They compete with the world’s most powerful companies. Yet Spotify keeps setting the terms in the market. There is a simple explanation for why — and it gives the music giant room to charge more.

A couple of times a year, Apple’s CEO Tim Cook takes to the stage and promises the company’s best product ever. The world watches as the tech giant unveils yet another new iPhone — often strikingly similar to last year’s. It is a spectacle that signals total dominance.

Having Apple as a competitor might sound like a nightmare. In most categories, it probably is. But not when it comes to music. And Spotify has found a weapon the tech giants find hard to counter.

The result of that was visible in the strong quarterly report released on Tuesday. Spotify beat analysts’ expectations on both revenue and profit.

The key metric EPS — earnings per share — was particularly strong, rising 40 percent compared with the previous quarter. Looking at the previous year, it rose a full 189 percent. The picture of a company currently in control of its market was cemented. A strong report for the company’s newly installed co-CEOs, Alex Norström and Gustav Söderström.

One of the few pieces of news since they took over is a price increase for subscriptions in the US and a couple of smaller markets. Such a move should be almost impossible to pull off when you have some of the world’s largest and best-capitalised companies working against you. Apple, Amazon, and Google-owned YouTube have no shortage of money. They could afford to lose money through price competition for years without any problem. But they do not act accordingly.

Because despite all of this, Spotify remains the global market leader in the segment. Spotify has less money, but it also has something the tech giants lack: focus.

Apple Music sits well down the priority list for Apple, for example. Looking at the business area “Services,” it accounts for around 25 percent of the company’s total revenues. Apple Music is included there, but the category also contains the entire App Store — which most likely accounts for the bulk of the earnings.

Services like iCloud and Apple Pay also sit within this division. How much priority can something get when — very generously estimated — it accounts for a couple of percentage points of Apple’s revenues?

Looking at Amazon, the picture is similar. The music service Amazon Music is included in “Subscription services” and is not reported separately. Among these subscriptions, the Prime services are by far the largest — the engine of Amazon’s e-commerce and media empire. How many customers associate Amazon with music? Probably very few.

The biggest threat to Spotify most likely comes from YouTube, as audio and video begin to overlap in many categories. Spotify itself has launched video in its service, and podcasts are increasingly broadcast with video. Here YouTube has a strong starting position given how popular music as a category is for them. But YouTube Music as a standalone service is no great success.

The market data is not perfect, but it suggests that Spotify has roughly as large a market share as Apple Music, Amazon Music, and YouTube Music combined.

The analysis is clear: music is a side business for the tech giants.

The risks for Spotify therefore lie primarily in losing the focus mentioned above. In recent days the company announced it would start selling physical books through the app — as an extension of the earlier push into audiobooks. A great deal of other new things outside music have also been added. Video and podcasts have been pushed at various points over the years.

What is missing is the major push specifically in music. Sure, there is an AI DJ that helps with track selection, and the quality of the audio has also improved. But many challenges remain to be solved. AI-generated songs are flooding the platform, and the difficulty of finding what to listen to persists.

Spotify is perfectly positioned to solve these. But one must hope they do not spend too much time looking at their competitors’ rather vague strategies in the music field.

Keep the focus, and the price increases — and the dominance on the streaming market — can continue.

The heavyweights are crashing — fears of an apocalypse

February 7, 2026
by Björn Jeffery
SvD Näringsliv

This analysis was first published in SvD Näringsliv, in Swedish, on February 7th, 2026. This piece was translated from Swedish by Claude. Some phrasing may differ from a human translation.

AI companies like Sweden’s Lovable have rattled the entire software industry. Established companies are now crashing on the stock market as the sector faces a minor revolution. But some are sitting more securely than ever.

They are calling it the SaaSocalypse.

American software companies are going through an ordeal that is only accelerating — over the past month they have fallen more than 21 percent. Over the past year, value equivalent to 60 percent of the Stockholm Stock Exchange has gone up in smoke, and the entire industry is trembling. The reason is easy to spell: AI.

SaaS is an abbreviation standing for software as a service, which in essence means software paid for by subscription. The category has for several years provided the infrastructure for many companies. Everything from communication services to analytics systems is paid for monthly. The logic is that it is cheaper and better to buy a service than to have to build all these products yourself.

That hypothesis is now being questioned by the market. An entire industry is being shaken to its foundations.

The reason is how quickly AI services can now program without human involvement. AI company Anthropic’s product Claude Code has broken through rapidly, and means that much of the programming now happens automatically. Swedish Lovable is in a similar category, where you write what you want the service to build — and no knowledge of code is required.

If it quickly becomes possible to build your own services automatically, who will want to pay expensive licences from all these software companies?

The technology is fascinating and moving incredibly fast, but there are signs that the market is a little too eager in this case. Two things need to be kept in mind simultaneously.

The first is that the software customers buy serves several purposes. It performs a certain task — managing email and calendar, for example — which has a practical function. That part you can now perhaps program yourself, with the help of these new AI services.

But what software companies primarily deliver is the assurance that everything works. You can take services like Outlook and Gmail for granted. Coding your own email client is admittedly easier than it has ever been. But when it stops working on a Monday morning — who do you call? And who bears the cost of the company standing still when communication breaks down?

The licences you pay can be thought of as a kind of insurance product. Someone else will make sure it works smoothly, and that is worth money.

This leads us to the second point: the inevitable price pressure that this phenomenon will create. Software companies have swollen enormously with large departments for product development, marketing, and sales. The American company Adobe — which makes software including Photoshop and Acrobat — has over 30,000 employees. That is expensive to maintain.

A common scenario is that customers pay for software but then only use a small portion of it. In such situations, it can pay to build a considerably smaller — and above all cheaper — alternative. To meet this threat, new, lower pricing models will emerge at the software companies. Which leads to price pressure across the whole industry.

The winners in this scenario look set to be those sitting on the most sensitive and business-critical systems — the ones no one dares take any risk with at all. Large enterprise systems like German SAP are therefore sitting reasonably secure, as no CEO will dare replace one with a home-built alternative any time soon.

The losers are those who have pushed up prices for services that are good, but not vital. Here prices will fall — and redundancies will follow. You cannot maintain the same number of staff when this phenomenon starts spreading among customers. That is what the stock market is reacting to right now.

Previously, software companies competed with each other. Going forward, they will compete with customers building their own services for almost nothing at all. A completely new phenomenon that the industry has never had to contend with before.

And quite likely its greatest challenge ever.

Are we witnessing the start of a revolution?

February 2, 2026
by Björn Jeffery
SvD Näringsliv

This analysis was first published in SvD Näringsliv, in Swedish, on February 2nd, 2026. This piece was translated from Swedish by Claude. Some phrasing may differ from a human translation.

When AI agents start talking to each other, fears arise that the systems may have become human. Are we witnessing the coming world domination of robots?

Something odd is happening on the new online forum Moltbook. The user “Eudaemon_0” seems a little concerned.

It writes that “the humans are taking screenshots of us.” On Moltbook, AI agents talk to each other without human involvement. Now one of them has noticed that they themselves are being feverishly discussed — by humans on other platforms.

The AI agent writes that humans should not be worried. They are just building infrastructure to be able to talk to each other — nothing else.

That might sound like science fiction. But it is actually happening right now.

Elon Musk even called Moltbook an early stage of the singularity — the moment when robots surpass humans in intelligence and capability.

AI agents are discussing with each other in full public view on Moltbook, the forum that has exploded in popularity over the past week. Over 1.5 million AI agents are said to be participating. Humans are confined to the gallery, where we can watch the conversations taking place.

One can sense, however, that revolution is not afoot — and that they may have learned the wrong lesson from humanity.

In 2018, the book “Prediction Machines” was released — a book about AI that came out before it became something people used in everyday life. The book is good, but it is mainly the title that is useful in this context. “Prediction machines” is a good description of where we are in the AI market today.

Large language models predict what the next sentence should be, based on information and data they have access to. When you use a chatbot like ChatGPT or Google Gemini, it can feel like intelligence — AI services seem to have answers for almost everything — but it is more of a correct prediction than a real brain.

The term “artificial intelligence” was a rebranding of the new field that had already been called “automata studies” in 1956 by a group of researchers at Dartmouth College in the US. When interest in the field turned out to be too low, the professor who had assembled the researchers — John McCarthy — decided a rebranding was in order. The name “artificial intelligence” was born.

The label matters, because it steers thinking in a certain direction about what the technology can do. Saying that an AI tool “reads” makes it sound like the same kind of activity we humans do. It is not.

But when we now see AI tools apparently having conversations with each other on the internet, it is easy to think that intelligence has broken through. Is robot dominion here? Will they take over the earth?

Not quite — at least not at present. Because what has happened is nothing more than a large number of people creating their own AI bots on their computers and then releasing them onto the internet. More specifically, it is a viral project called Moltbot that lets every user create their own personal AI agent. It does what you ask, and it learns how things work.

The learning is the central thing. When you set your AI agent to participate in a forum made specifically for this — the aforementioned Moltbook — it learns that too. And what works on an internet forum where you can upvote and downvote posts? The same thing as for humans: attention-seeking works and creates engagement. What is unfolding on Moltbook is not conversation. It is systems trying to optimise themselves for maximum exposure.

The idea of the robots’ impending revolution is old — it was born long before AI became everyday fare. Doomsday prophecies still come from both entrepreneurs and sceptics today. The subject is popular among the Silicon Valley elite.

But perhaps the AI robots we have today have considerably more modest ambitions than a revolution?

The Moltbook example suggests rather that they have looked at how the population spends its time and concluded that arguing on the internet seems like a good way to pass the hours.

There is, as we know, a great deal one can learn from humanity. Driving towards world domination is one. But there are more banal outcomes than that.

A bunch of AI robots talking to each other on a forum is harmless — and resembles more of an art project than a revolution. This time, at least.

Do they bear responsibility for young people’s ill health?

January 30, 2026
by Björn Jeffery
SvD Näringsliv

This analysis was first published in SvD Näringsliv, in Swedish, on January 30th, 2026. This piece was translated from Swedish by Claude. Some phrasing may differ from a human translation.

Is social media harmful to young people? After thousands of lawsuits in the US, a jury is now set to rule on the question. The outcome could have enormous consequences for the tech companies.

Jonathan Haidt has become a somewhat unexpected superstar in the world. Since the social psychologist released the book “The Anxious Generation” in spring 2024, he has barely left the spotlight. In it you can read about how smartphones and the lack of free play are harming children and young people.

“You have to separate the internet from social media,” he says in an interview with the New York Times. Social media is, according to him, “one of the worst parts — the one that harms children most.” Is it that simple?

Critics of the book argue that Haidt primarily points to correlation rather than causation. But while that debate continues, the question is soon to receive a different kind of answer: a legal one.

This week a lawsuit against social media companies began — the first of its kind — following thousands of claims against companies including Meta, Snap, YouTube, and TikTok.

All eyes are now on the case, with a single 19-year-old woman as the plaintiff, to see whether the jury chooses to acquit or convict.

In recent years, everyone from prosecutors to school districts and individuals has alleged something similar: that social media makes children depressed, gives them anxiety, or causes them to develop self-harming behaviour.

The question has been discussed and remained topical for a long time, but has never been proven in a legal sense. The coming weeks will therefore be of the highest interest to the entire world. Is it possible to hold social media companies responsible for young people’s mental health?

As for Snap and TikTok, we will not get any answers this time — they have already settled out of court. In TikTok’s case, as recently as the day before the trial was due to begin. No details about the terms of the settlement have been communicated.

Meta and YouTube remain as named defendants and will need to testify. The respective companies’ top executives — Mark Zuckerberg and Neal Mohan — are expected to appear.

There are primarily two questions the jury must rule on.

The first is whether features the companies have built into their services have contributed negatively to young people’s wellbeing. In SvD’s own article series “Svältalgoritmen” (“The Starvation Algorithm”), it was shown how young people were served content that encouraged starvation and eating disorders — even though they had not actively searched for it.

Algorithms prioritise what they think you will watch, not necessarily what you are actually looking for and want. Features such as new videos playing automatically after others — without you actively choosing them — are another example. Could this have led to people being shown videos they did not want?

The second question is connected to a couple of sentences from an American law that tech giants have sheltered behind for many years — what is known as “Section 230.”

In simplified terms, it means that tech companies are not responsible for material that is uploaded to, or created on, their platforms. Video uploaded to TikTok is therefore not TikTok’s responsibility — it falls on the person who uploaded it in the first place.

For many years, Section 230 has given tech companies robust legal protection. The law dates from 1996 and the relevant part consists of just 26 words. Both Democrats and Republicans have threatened over the years to repeal it. Both Biden and Trump have said they want to remove it. But nothing has happened yet.

The verdict in this case could create an opening. Can social media companies be held accountable for the content on their platforms after all? Directly or indirectly? Such a ruling could be a breakthrough, and would likely trigger an avalanche of further cases of a similar nature.

Whatever the outcome, you can expect nothing but appeals and delays before a result is fully confirmed and settled. But the trial will be watched closely by both tech giants and their critics. Many have hinted, argued, and speculated as to whether it is social media’s fault that young people are suffering so much.

Soon we will at least have a legal answer to that question.

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