Start - Björn Jeffery

Nobody at Apple wants a revolution

September 9, 2026

by Björn Jeffery

A million-kronor salary – but the job doesn’t exist

September 4, 2026

by Björn Jeffery

Up 800 percent – the hangover is here

August 28, 2026

by Björn Jeffery

SvD Näringsliv

This analysis was first published in SvD Näringsliv, in Swedish, on August 28th, 2026. This piece was translated from Swedish by Claude. Some phrasing may differ from a human translation.

The soaring share price at Sivers Semiconductors has turned into a headache for the company. Now that the momentum is fading, what mostly remains are big promises about the future. The numbers right now tell a very different story.

The stock market is forward-looking, as the saying goes. That is especially true of the Swedish semiconductor company Sivers Semiconductors, which has surged on the exchange after a sudden and enormous burst of interest from investors.

By talking about a “pipeline” of possible customer agreements, the company seems to want to shift attention away from its figures right now and toward a rose-tinted future.

Having just seen Sivers’ new numbers in Friday morning’s quarterly report, that strategy is easy to understand. Operating losses had nearly tripled, while revenue fell. And now the enormous share price rally the business has enjoyed has turned into a burden.

Sivers’ materials state that its pipeline grew to $1.2 billion in July. Given that revenue in the quarter just ended was only SEK 53.8 million, the list of prospective deals looks close to gigantic. It would mean an increase in sales of more than 21,000 percent compared with the previous quarter.

But that is unlikely to happen. The list contains no binding agreements. It is instead a roster of customers and transactions that could conceivably materialize. The reason companies report certain specific key figures is that accounting standards are the same for everyone. You know they hold up, and you can compare them with other firms in the same category.

This roster of prospective customers is not one of those. There is no guarantee that any of the deals actually happen.

There are now signs that the market has sobered up somewhat. Sivers’ share price is admittedly still up more than 860 percent over the past six months, but on Friday the company shed a fifth of its value the moment trading opened. Volumes are falling too. There is simply not the same appetite for Sivers Semiconductors as there was a couple of months ago – and with results like these, it will be hard to rekindle.

The company’s supporters argue that it is wrong to judge Sivers by its share price. You have to look at the underlying technology and the potential ahead instead. As general advice for analyzing a business, that is sound.

But when a stock lands in the middle of a frenzy like the one Sivers has been through, a strange picture emerges. The share and the company almost lead two separate lives. If everyone who bought in had a perfect grasp of the market for its products – optical transmitter modules and silicon photonics solutions, among others – that would be one thing.

But that is rarely how it works.

A company can have extraordinary potential, but you cannot set aside what is happening on the exchange at the same time. Least of all when senior insiders have chosen to sell shares. That they are taking advantage of a high valuation is understandable. But it sends a questionable signal. Do they not believe in this vast pipeline themselves?

The downside of a huge rally is that the momentum then has to be sustained for a long time. There needs to be a credible path – even one lying far into the future – to justifying what the market has put on the business. Otherwise it becomes difficult to hold shareholders’ attention. That is an unusual challenge. Most listed companies have never seen, and never will see, gains of several hundred percent in a matter of months.

Friday’s reaction on the exchange suggests Sivers Semiconductors will struggle with it. Whether the pipeline is accurate and will be realized is impossible to say.

But the company has a large problem right now, and that is coping with a share price which has priced in near-miraculous success in the relatively near term.

When the quarterly figures show the opposite, that becomes one more weight to carry.

And it takes time that management could have spent turning potential deals into real revenue.

Nvidia’s plan feels eerily familiar

August 26, 2026

by Björn Jeffery

SvD Näringsliv

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

Nvidia is not only innovative with its chips – the creativity now extends to the financial side as well. But acting as a bank for its customers, against collateral of uncertain value, carries an echo of the financial crisis.

If GB Glace had to lend children money so they could buy a Piggelin – wouldn’t that be something of a red flag?

Keep that analogy in mind when Nvidia reports its quarterly figures on Wednesday evening. Jensen Huang will talk about new chips and the enormous demand from customers. The company’s new financing arrangement will hardly be at the center of things.

But there is something odd here that sets off alarm bells.

If Silicon Valley has a history of being inventive with technology, New York has a matching reputation when it comes to finance. It is innovation of a different kind, but behind the scenes it underpins a great many corporate deals.

The chip maker Nvidia is now testing a blend of those two worlds. Innovative technical products with innovative funding. Together with some of the largest players in finance, it is offering its customers loans so they can invest more in chips and data centers.

Founder Jensen Huang has assembled a group featuring the biggest names in the industry – among them Apollo, Blackstone, BlackRock and Goldman Sachs.

Between them they have taken on one of the obstacles to the ongoing AI expansion: how customers are going to afford to keep it going. Together they have scraped together $500 billion to lend to new and existing buyers.

Costs are precisely what has been in focus for Nvidia lately. Sharp price increases on computer memory have made the servers used for AI computation more expensive. That is not Nvidia’s fault – but it becomes their problem. Both memory and their GPU chips are needed for the systems to work. That pushes up the total bill for anyone wanting to build a data center.

Nvidia could lower its own prices to compensate for the increase. But it obviously has no wish to. This is where the financing arrangement comes in. By offering cheaper credit, the total cost for customers comes down.

Everyone happy?

Unfortunately it is not quite that simple. Underpinning this arrangement is an unusual form of collateral.

When you borrow to buy a property, the building itself serves as security. If you cannot pay, the lender simply comes and takes it.

Data centers do include buildings, of course, but those are the cheap part in this category. What sits inside is what costs money.

So Nvidia and its financial partners are taking access to the chips as security for their loans. They regard computing power as an asset that can be borrowed against – an “investable infrastructure asset”, as Huang calls it. But is it really?

The assumption being made is that this computing power, like a property, has a more or less constant value. There will always be someone who wants it. Hopefully at roughly the same price. But given how AI has developed over the past few months, that is far from obvious.

The main threat comes from the east, where the Chinese AI models keep getting better. And more importantly – they are dramatically cheaper to use. Being open source means access is free and can spread rapidly among developers.

Large companies such as Thomson Reuters have built AI products based on a variant of Alibaba’s model Qwen, and Cursor – the coding tool SpaceX acquired – uses the Chinese model Kimi. The list goes on. Nvidia itself is now spending $6 billion to build a model of its own that can compete with these new Chinese players.

If AI development continues in this direction, it is possible that the amount of computing power in demand falls – or at least does not grow at the astronomical rate much of the industry expects. That in turn would leave the loans Nvidia and its partners are writing resting on shakier security.

Issuing large loans where the underlying collateral is weak is a story we have heard before. The great financial crisis of 2008 was built on exactly this. There it was home loans that could not be repaid, despite sounding like the most stable thing in the world. They were not. Least of all after financial innovation took off and created a mass of new assets with that decidedly unstable one at the bottom.

What Nvidia and its partners are doing is not exactly the same thing. But it sounds uncomfortably familiar.

TikTok’s new move could backfire

August 25, 2026

by Björn Jeffery

SvD Näringsliv

This analysis was first published in SvD Näringsliv, in Swedish, on August 25th, 2026. This piece was translated from Swedish by Claude. Some phrasing may differ from a human translation.

After the attack in Fagersta, attention has turned to TikTok’s darkest corners. The platform claims that almost everything inappropriate is caught before it is published – but the gaps are still wide. At the same time, TikTok is making a choice that risks making the problem worse.

It’s called algospeak – the words used on TikTok to avoid getting caught by the safety filters. By now they are so established that everyone knows what is meant.

“Unalive” instead of “kill,” “seggs” instead of “sex.” Everyone understands – except the filters themselves, which after several years of this still don’t seem to have caught up.

Getting around TikTok’s filters, in other words, requires no great linguistic effort. In the wake of last week’s attack in Fagersta, questions are once again being asked about whether there were signals the platforms could have picked up earlier.

But the question is how highly TikTok actually prioritizes fixing this.

As recently as July this year, the company told The Independent that 97 percent of all inappropriate material on the service was removed by automated systems. A full 99 percent disappeared before anyone had even reported it, according to the company.

That sounds impressive at first. But the context of the statement is less flattering: it came as an explanation for why TikTok was laying off 300 employees in Ireland who worked on precisely that – moderation and safety.

The people who presumably understand this best – the human moderators, whose job it is to review video clips – are not impressed.

An anonymous TikTok employee tells the paper that its AI systems get things wrong “all the time.” And it goes both ways – they miss material that should have been removed, and they take down posts that should have stayed up under the platform’s own rules. Holding up two fingers and a thumb is sometimes read by the AI as holding a gun. A human sees the difference in a second; the artificial intelligence is not always that smart when it comes to this particular thing.

In some cases, the glorification of violence and the celebration of murderers happens completely out in the open. In the Fagersta case, there is much to suggest that the suspected perpetrator took part in the TCC movement, True Crime Community. It is a loose grouping that venerates convicted killers and glorifies violent crime in general. According to information obtained by SvD, there are indications that he had several TikTok accounts suspended, only for them to reappear under near-identical names.

TCC is one of several violence-oriented groups that exist on TikTok and similar platforms. It connects people who would otherwise be alone with these interests, and can contribute to radicalization. Crimes of this kind are usually committed by individuals, but those individuals belong to a wider setting that lives online.

The column inches now being devoted to TCC say something about how visible the movement is – this is no hidden subculture that requires special knowledge to find. It sits in the open on TikTok. And still the platform cannot keep it out.

That young people gravitate toward services like TikTok is well documented. Much of the debate – in Sweden too – has therefore been about stopping them from getting there in the first place. Minister for Social Affairs Jakob Forssmed (KD) has talked about an age limit for social media in Sweden, a question now under official review.

Australia has gone furthest, becoming the first country in the world to ban social media for minors. But new figures show that the share of 13- to 15-year-olds using TikTok there is now just one percentage point lower than before the ban took effect. The prohibition has not solved the root problem, at least not yet. The underlying drive – to find like-minded people on the internet – remains.

TikTok cannot be held responsible for everything its users do. But it is equally wrong to describe these perpetrators as individuals acting in a vacuum. They are part of a milieu that celebrates brutality and urges its members to commit terrible acts. We know this. And TikTok knows it too.

Knowing that movements organize and plan attacks on your own platform ought to carry a substantial responsibility. TikTok’s head of communications in the Nordics told Expressen that “violence and violent extremism have no place on TikTok.” Yet the company is cutting hundreds of moderators and letting automated systems take over more of the work. There are clearly large holes in those safety filters – and they now risk getting worse.

We are long past the point where TikTok can plead ignorance. This can, unfortunately, happen again.

Klarna may be forced to do the unthinkable

August 18, 2026

by Björn Jeffery

SvD Näringsliv

This analysis was first published in SvD Näringsliv, in Swedish, on August 18th, 2026. This piece was translated from Swedish by Claude. Some phrasing may differ from a human translation.

Fast, cocky, unpredictable. Klarna built its success on being everything the big banks were not. But when the stock falls more than 20 percent, the market’s demands become clear. Now the payments giant may be forced to do something that has long been unthinkable.

It’s fun to be an upstart in the business world. Especially in banking, where the market consists of gray, dull colossuses that have looked much the same for decades.

Klarna has made the most of that position. The company built a contemporary brand, worked with unexpected celebrities, and used a tone that was radical — compared with dry big banks, at least. While its competitors got stuck in a kind of generic airport advertising, Klarna could come across as young, modern and forward-leaning. It worked perfectly well as long as Klarna had everything to gain and fairly little to lose.

But on the stock market things work differently. There, expectations are everything.

In the equity market you get an immediate verdict when your numbers don’t match what others had in mind — and that can be painful.

Klarna is going through exactly that right now.

When the company reported its quarterly figures on Tuesday, it beat analysts’ expectations. But after a weaker full-year forecast than anticipated, the stock fell more than 20 percent in early trading. Several senior executives are also leaving.

Now it looks as though Klarna has to change course — and become a considerably duller company. After its listing on the US exchange, the punky attitude to both marketing and strategy may turn into a liability.

The stock market wants results first and foremost. Predictable ones.

This thesis could explain the departures now taking place from Klarna’s top management. Chief operating officer Camilla Giesecke left in the spring, and on Tuesday came word that both chief financial officer Niclas Neglén and chief marketing officer David Sandström will step down.

Together they have taken the company through a listing and into something new. But this phase is defined by different qualities — and the team that ran the first legs is not necessarily the right one to lead the next. Perhaps they have realized this themselves? These are senior people who have worked at Klarna for a long time. But their job descriptions are now something else entirely from when they started. A greyer phase is beginning — and a shift of key people may be exactly right for it.

Much suggests that Klarna needs to grow up. It would do the company good to become a slightly dreary and predictable listed business — like everyone else in its category. Cutting the full-year revenue forecast, as in Tuesday’s quarterly report, creates an anxiety that is hard to recover from. A fifth of the already pressured market capitalization went up in smoke immediately. Klarna’s strategy and plans may well be right, but the market isn’t following. It wants you to keep what you previously promised, regardless of what happens internally or in the wider world.

A new Klarna could be defined by entirely different qualities. Stability, and an ability to beat modestly set expectations. A locomotive moving slowly upward on the exchange at an unremarkable pace. A management team that inspires confidence in analysts and shareholders.

That stands in sharp contrast to the Klarna that once made a racket in Stockholm’s dry financial world. And whose pace, innovation and execution created a new giant among Swedish and international banks. It is a remarkable feat — and one that has paid off well for those who believed in CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski’s vision.

But now the market wants something else. Something considerably duller.

Klarna’s rock ‘n’ roll era may be over.

The opposite effect: X’s revenue is collapsing

August 14, 2026

by Björn Jeffery

SvD Näringsliv

This analysis was first published in SvD Näringsliv, in Swedish, on August 14th, 2026. This piece was translated from Swedish by Claude. Some phrasing may differ from a human translation.

The social network X has changed its name, its owner, and its line in the accounts. While it has kept its standing with those in power, new figures show that revenue has sunk like a stone. But owner Elon Musk has a new plan.

It has been hard to know how things are actually going for X — formerly Twitter. Now a door has opened.

When Elon Musk bought Twitter in 2022 he took the company off the stock market and transparency shrank. Since then the service has changed its name and moved between several of Musk’s companies, ending up at his now-listed space venture SpaceX. And suddenly it is possible to see what is happening behind the scenes.

The figures don’t just show how the social network is doing. They also give a clue as to what Musk intends to use it for.

Under Musk’s direction the platform has become a more radical service. The tone is harsher and almost no posts are taken down any more. The end of censorship, some say. Others feel the radicalization has made the service unpleasant, and have chosen to delete their accounts.

That a major change has taken place is also plain in the numbers.

During an on-stage interview in 2023, Elon Musk said he did not intend to yield to “financial blackmail” from advertisers who were unhappy with how the platform’s content was developing. Those boycotting X could “go to hell,” Musk said during the interview.

Many advertisers appear to have done exactly that.

In 2022, X (then Twitter) had around one billion dollars in revenue during the year’s second quarter. Set against the same period this year, the corresponding figure is 367 million dollars. A decline of 66 percent in four years. Looking at the whole first half of the year, the drop is essentially as large.

Two-thirds of all advertising revenue has therefore disappeared from X. A normal company probably would not survive that. But as we know, nothing is normal in Elon Musk’s world.

SpaceX does not report the social network separately in its accounts, but there is a line for advertising revenue that amounts to much the same thing. Everything is listed in the category “AI revenue,” which is optimistic to say the least.

Classifying ads in the X feed as “AI” says less about what the service is today — and more about what Musk wants it to become in the future.

In the space company’s prospectus ahead of the listing, X is described as a “free speech platform.” Selling ads is admittedly mentioned a couple of times, but the social network seems to serve a more important purpose than that. X is to become a data source for — and a distributor of — AI services. It is simply a way to acquire users for them. In the same way that Meta uses Facebook to get users for Meta’s AI services, and Google likewise with its respective operations.

It is worth noting, however, that the market leaders Anthropic and OpenAI have no equivalent services to draw on for winning new customers — and they are by far the largest anyway. Hitching a ride on other popular services is not an obvious method.

One can also wonder how the content on X affects potential AI customers.

As a private individual it can be entertaining to read about marmots on OnlyFans, or Italian bank loans to farmers secured against parmesan cheese. In between, less pleasant things such as the occasional Nazi. A generous description would be “eclectic.” But it is easy to understand why many no longer want to take part.

That is precisely why the step of associating your company with a platform carrying this material is not so obvious. It can even become counterproductive. Advertisers have already fled, because they do not want to appear in that content environment.

And it is exactly those businesses that Musk and SpaceX need to reach with their AI services. So far, few private individuals pay for AI. The purchase of the coding service Cursor is one example of a bet on specialized offerings that companies might conceivably pay for. The new service Grokbot, launched this week, is described as a “colleague” — an AI that works on your company’s behalf.

X works well for raising awareness of these new products — but that is not enough. It has to turn into paying customers for the logic to hold together.

Much therefore suggests that X’s many acquisitions and relocations within Musk’s corporate portfolio were about finance more than strategy. Musk was the named buyer — but he brought a great deal of other people’s debt with him to complete the deal.

Those loans have now been settled, and converted into shares in entirely different companies. That is an achievement in itself. Billion-dollar borrowing taken on to buy an overvalued company like Twitter has now evaporated. And compared with that, X’s advertising revenue is a very small problem to solve.

What was once one of the world’s most important social networks has become a subordinate clause in Musk’s enormous corporate construction. It is simply not particularly important any more — neither to him nor to the space company at large.

Musk has his sights on bigger challenges these days. We are talking about a company whose goal is to build human colonies on Mars. He has his hands full there.

Tesla’s solution is everyday business in the US

August 13, 2026

by Björn Jeffery

SvD Näringsliv

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

Tesla’s Swedish conflict with the union got the most American ending imaginable. It should be a warning bell — more tech companies may follow that do not accept the Swedish model.

After more than a thousand days on strike for some of those involved, the conflict between IF Metall and Tesla is over.

It probably didn’t turn out quite as either party had imagined. But in the end the solution was very simple: it came down to money. Tesla bought the remaining IF Metall-affiliated employees out of their jobs, and so there was no one left who could strike.

The dispute — and the resolution in particular — shows how tech companies choose to go their own way in the Swedish labor market. Tesla may be first here, but they will not be last.

How can you even argue for years about something so uncontroversial, from a Swedish perspective, as a collective agreement?

To understand that, you have to go back to how Tesla started. They were not a car company that needed to be electrified. It was a blank sheet of paper. Every preconceived idea about how a carmaker should look and function had to be reconsidered. The factories, the sales channels, the customer offering — everything was new.

You’ve heard it before. Tech companies that will turn the world upside down by questioning everything. But in Tesla’s case they did precisely that — and pulled the rest of the auto industry into electrification at a rapid pace.

They earned that position by playing by their own rules. There are strong unions in the American car industry too. But none that hold an agreement with Tesla specifically.

Conflicts, on the other hand, there are plenty of. Tesla has had legal disputes with both German and American unions over questions similar to the ones IF Metall struck over. If Tesla had given in in Sweden, it would have carried much wider consequences for the carmaker around the world. If Sweden can, why can’t we? That Tesla would suddenly back down was therefore always highly unlikely.

The solution — buying out every employee connected to IF Metall — is highly unconventional, but pragmatic. It ended with a price tag, in kronor and öre, for simply making the problem go away. In Sweden many experience this as a shock. In the US it is everyday business. There, legal conflicts most often end with some form of settlement in which one party pays the other.

Reaching for your wallet to get your way is thus standard. The difference here is that Swedes — and unions in particular, perhaps — consider the Swedish model so unique that it cannot be circumvented in this simple way. But apparently it can. For a practiced rule-breaker like Elon Musk, Tesla’s CEO, it is a complete non-issue.

At best, the aborted strike can serve as a warning bell for Sweden and other naive parties. There is a long line of American tech companies present in Sweden that are used to entirely different methods, working practices and conflict management. When they come here to invest or build data centers, they are not primarily interested in fitting into the Swedish system. On the contrary — challenging the establishment is the approach Silicon Valley holds highest of all. They want to run their businesses in whatever way suits them best.

At worst, and this is the more likely scenario, this is the first of many similar disputes. If an American company can buy its way out of a three-year strike with one of Sweden’s largest unions, what other institutions and principles can it get around? There is no shortage of money. The market value of these companies is counted in trillions of dollars.

You can also imagine that quite a few Swedish tech companies are watching this with more envy than disgust. Whatever their origin, the methods behind tech companies are very similar. Grow fast and solve the problems along the way. A union conflict can be exactly that kind of problem — one that now carries a clear price tag. Pay, and move on.

Seen from that perspective, this settlement may have been expensive for Tesla — but those who will pay the highest price are the Swedish system.

The American methods are on their way in. And they work — evidently — perfectly well.

For Silicon Valley, Sweden is a bargain

July 20, 2026

by Björn Jeffery

SvD Näringsliv

This analysis was first published in SvD Näringsliv, in Swedish, on July 20th, 2026. This piece was translated from Swedish by Claude. Some phrasing may differ from a human translation.

American tech companies are buying Swedish electricity, luring Swedish entrepreneurs and moving Swedish companies to the US. Politicians and the business community applaud. But as more and more ends up in American hands, Sweden may pay a high price.

Benjamin Dousa seems very pleased.

“OpenAI opening an office in Stockholm is proof of Sweden’s position as one of the world’s leading technology nations.”

In a press release, the Moderate minister for international development cooperation and foreign trade gets to welcome the large American AI company to Sweden’s capital.

He is not alone in receiving them with open arms.

Industry organizations, politicians and entrepreneurs seem touchingly agreed that the AI company’s newly opened branch is proof of Sweden as a major tech nation. In the cheering, everyone appears to overlook that OpenAI opened an office in Madrid as recently as the week before, and that they are hiring just as many people there as in Stockholm. Four.

At the same time as there is talk of how important Swedish and European independence from the US is, there are few things interpreted as positively as American interest in Sweden.

Because the interest is certainly there. The Americans are coming to build data centers with Swedish electricity. To invest in Swedish startups. And to open Swedish branches of large American corporations.

But there is another way to look at it, too.

A kind of colonization of Sweden is under way, driven by American tech companies.

And we applaud while it happens.

Gabriel Vasquez has been to Stockholm nine times in a year.

“There’s no time to be lazy!” proclaims the venture capitalist from the American heavyweight Andreessen Horowitz, also known as A16Z.

There is business to be done here.

Sweden — and Stockholm in particular — has many new and promising entrepreneurs to offer. Vasquez, who was visiting for a conference in the spring, is just one example of the many Americans who have come to town to charm them.

In a short space of time A16Z has invested in a number of Swedish startups, among them Pit, Endra and Dentio. All are newly founded companies in the AI field that have made headlines because of their investors.

The Americans are visible among the very fastest-growing Swedish companies as well.

The venture capital firm Accel has invested in the vibe coding rocket Lovable, and the chip giant Nvidia took part in the funding of the AI legal platform Legora.

The development is received with open arms — from entrepreneurs and the establishment alike.

“When we had decided to build Pit, [A16Z] were the first ones we called. They moved extremely fast. We didn’t really need the money, but we wanted the strongest partner — and that’s what we got in A16Z,” said Fredrik Hjelm, co-founder of both the newly started Pit and the e-scooter company Voi.

A well-known founder like Hjelm probably had many options, Swedish ones among them. But this time the choice was American.

Pit was already prepared for this, having a parent company registered in the US — in Delaware, to be precise. Having one tends to be a requirement from American investors.

And there are particular reasons for that.

In the event of a sale or a listing of the company, the profits — and any taxes — will end up right there, in the slightly sleepy state just south of New Jersey.

It is a good way off before anything like that happens to the newly started Pit, though.

For Swedish Lovable, whose current valuation is rumored to be around 113 billion kronor, it lies somewhat closer. They too have their holding company registered in Delaware.

They have around 250 employees today and 70 open positions. The majority of these sit in Stockholm, something CEO Anton Osika has said he is proud of. These are jobs — with employees who pay tax — that exist here and now.

In an interview with Bloomberg, Osika is asked why the head office remains in Stockholm. He mentions that people rarely quit, and the access to skilled staff, as two major factors. Osika says Lovable can become the biggest magnet for talent in the city.

What he strangely does not mention is the pay level. Which is one of the principal reasons American venture capitalists are so enthusiastic about having Swedish employees in their portfolio companies.

Swedish employers often complain about how expensive it is to have staff in Sweden.

Compared with Silicon Valley, it is a bargain.

In California you have to state salary ranges in job advertisements, which creates good transparency about what different positions cost. Look at a role that both Lovable and Californian Anthropic are currently hiring for — “analytics engineer” — and the American position sits at between 275,000 and 370,000 dollars a year. On top of that come options and similar instruments that can be worth many times more. But if we look only at the base salary, that would correspond to a monthly wage of around 200,000 to 300,000 kronor.

That is eight times higher than the median salary in Sweden.

Lovable does not state what it pays in wages, but the union Sveriges ingenjörer writes that a graduate engineer with ten years of experience earns on average between 50,800 and 65,200 kronor a month. Even at the top of that range — with employer social contributions and everything else included — it is nowhere near the American costs. Not even if you add an AI bonus for working at one of Swedish tech’s hottest companies.

What is taking place, then, is a wage arbitrage. American investor money goes to Swedish salaries. Which in turn go back to create value for American holding companies. It spins off a little tax in Sweden along the way, but the largest values end up outside the country’s borders.

The raw material — Swedish tech talent — is refined by another country.

There are more raw materials of American interest in Sweden. Swedish electricity, for instance.

In Luleå sits one of Meta’s data centers, running entirely on hydropower from the Lule river. In 2018 it expanded and was to become one of the world’s largest at the time.

They are not alone. As recently as June this year came word that Google is building a data center in Horndal, just outside Avesta in Dalarna. 100 permanent jobs are promised when it is finished, in fields from electricians to catering.

Microsoft’s data centers outside Staffanstorp, Gävle and Sandviken have been there for some time. Other players such as Swedish Ecodatacenter supply services to many American customers.

Why all this interest?

The AI expansion around the world has not only created enormous demand for chips and components — there is also a shortage of electricity. It is not enough to build data centers; they also need to be connected to a grid with the capacity to take them. In June last year, OpenAI’s CEO Sam Altman said we will see a large share of the planet’s energy spent on AI computation.

The question for Sweden therefore becomes not just how many jobs these data centers can generate, but also whether they fit in the electricity grids. And for that matter — what we as a country will not have room for, in favor of the power going to these American data centers.

The electricity that was allocated to the battery factory Northvolt looks set to go partly to a data center instead. The plant that American Lyten bought is not yet running, but the land beside it has already been sold to a data center. And according to the book “Northvoltfallet” by the journalist Gunnar Lindstedt, it is Google that is queuing to move in when it is ready.

The manufacture of green batteries for the vehicle industry was to become a new strategic base industry for Sweden. It remains to be seen whether there will be any batteries at all in the near term. But parts of the grid capacity are already allocated to the data center, so battery production on the scale Northvolt originally planned can never happen.

And if there are any batteries — then it will be Lyten, from the US, that draws the biggest winning ticket. With Swedish electricity and newly built infrastructure as raw material.

While the American investments rain down on the country, Swedish politicians and entrepreneurs cheer. It is seen as an achievement to attract money and attention from companies like Google, Microsoft and Meta. There is talk of momentum for “Silicon Valhalla” — the label meant to market the Swedish tech scene abroad.

But who actually gains most from these ventures?

While some entrepreneurs are very quick to criticize how few Swedish pension funds invest in domestic tech companies, they are just as quick to accept money from American funds for their own startups. And through that they move a large part of the value creation to the other side of the Atlantic. Is that something to be glad about and celebrate?

In other parts of Europe a resistance movement has begun to form.

The European tech initiative Rebuild aims at precisely this. They are trying to identify the European tech companies that exist, and to look at how they can grow without having to give everything up to the US. Over a year they are gathering data and building opinion around the idea that dependence on American tech companies comes with a risk. Can we trust them when we need them?

In mid-June, Anthropic’s latest AI model was suddenly cut off from the outside world because of political decisions. Without resilience, Europe could stand very alone if the winds start blowing differently from the big country in the west.

At Rebuild there is no cheering that the Americans are coming. They are planning for what an internet looks like and works like without them.

At a conference in Copenhagen, Rebuild’s initiator, Thomas Madsen-Mygdal, is asked a question in a panel discussion. Why should we care whether things go well for tech companies in Europe or not?

He answers quickly:

“Because it’s our home.”

Perhaps it is no harder than that? To believe that Sweden — or Europe — could cut all ties to American tech companies in the near term would be naive. But it would be equally naive to welcome every initiative as though it were made for Sweden’s benefit. Would we feel the same about them if they came from China, for example?

The new Swedish raw materials in tech — entrepreneurs, tech workers and green electricity — are refined by American shell companies in Delaware.

Is that how we best take care of our common home?

Outside of Sweden’s borders, more and more are starting to answer no to that question.

Hemnet’s crisis is self-inflicted

June 23, 2026

by Björn Jeffery

SvD Näringsliv

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

Selling a home in Sweden without using Hemnet was unthinkable just a few years ago. Now the estate agents have revolted, the share is collapsing – and Sweden’s Competition Authority has opened an investigation. What has actually happened to Hemnet?

A newly married couple had an estate agent visiting their apartment in Bagarmossen this spring. They were looking to upgrade, and the apartment was being prepared to go on the market.

“We’ll see if we go with Hemnet, it depends. This is probably the last year we do it,” the agent said.

A Hemnet listing, which was once a given, is now optional. Perhaps even something you can skip entirely. That’s just one of many symptoms of how dramatically the playing field has shifted for the property platform.

Monday brought another: Sweden’s Competition Authority is now investigating the company for abusing its dominant position – after Hemnet tried to create new partnerships with estate agents.

When a company is market leader, the strategy is usually fairly straightforward: make sure everything continues as before. Apple wants people to buy new iPhones, Google wants people to Google. Market leaders benefit from the status quo.

For many years, Hemnet was exactly there. A self-evident and indispensable marketplace for anyone buying or selling property. It was also a paradise for snoopers – “Hemnet-surfing” became a term for people browsing home photos to see how the neighbors had decorated their living room.

But even market leaders can run into trouble.

And for Hemnet’s part, it appears to be largely self-inflicted.

Much of the success – and the subsequent problems – can be traced back to the ownership structure. During Hemnet’s golden years, the service was partly owned by several large estate agency chains. Their incentive to use Hemnet was then crystal clear – Hemnet’s success was the agents’ success. The analysis of the market was also correct: it was better for home buyers to go to one place to search than to navigate around all the different agencies.

In 2015, the Norwegian media group Schibsted (which also owns Svenska Dagbladet) was set to buy a majority stake in Hemnet, but that deal was blocked by Sweden’s Competition Authority. Instead, private equity firms General Atlantic and Sprints stepped in as co-owners. Several of the agencies sold parts of their holdings, with Fastighetsbyrån and Svensk Fastighetsförmedling selling everything. The target was the stock market – and Hemnet went public in April 2021.

When the agents sold, Hemnet’s best partners disappeared from the ownership register. And a new challenge emerged.

On the stock market, you need to show growth. That’s hard to do in a market where you don’t control supply and demand yourself. The volume of homes sold is influenced by many factors, but Hemnet can only control a few. And if you can’t increase the number of properties sold, you have to work with the other variable in the business: price. Listings therefore became considerably more expensive on Hemnet.

“Greed has unfortunately taken over,” said Marcus Svanberg, CEO of Länsförsäkringar Fastighetsförmedling, speaking to Dagens Industri. Without the clear incentive of owning a stake in the service, the agents pushed back and started looking for alternatives.

SBAB had already acquired the property service Booli back in 2015 – at the time a promising search company. It has since grown into a formidable competitor. Booli aggregates property listings in one place and then refers users on to the agencies’ own websites. One might reasonably ask why a state-owned bank is competing with a private company over property listings. Hemnet therefore filed a complaint against the competitor with Sweden’s Competition Authority in January.

This week brought an unexpected turn.

Not only did Sweden’s Competition Authority dismiss the complaint against Booli – they also launched a new investigation into Hemnet itself. It concerns Hemnet’s new partnership with agents around “sell first, pay later,” which the authority describes as “suspected abuse of a dominant position.”

Meanwhile, Hemnet’s share price has only fallen. Since the listing it has dropped over 60 percent, and a full 75 percent compared to a year ago. This despite the company having spent nearly two billion kronor buying back its own shares in recent years. Nobody seems to want to buy this stock right now – except the company itself, which also has approval to buy back a further half a billion kronor.

Falling out with the estate agents has proven costly for Hemnet. Some agents have joined forces to apparently recreate what Hemnet once was – an agent-owned aggregation service called Boneo. There the agents have every incentive in the world to make it fly. The old Hemnet strategy is back, just now as a competitor.

Market leader Hemnet has a long road back to reclaim its position.

Right now, it looks more like a power shift is coming.