Sweden's biggest operator Telia partnered with North American investment firm Brookfield Asset Management (BAM) on a sovereign AI venture for Sweden.

The partnerships build on previously announced plans from Brookfield to invest up to $10 billion in a data center in Strängnäs, Sweden. Telia will integrate that facility plus planned facilities into its national fiber network to provide key elements of its digital infrastructure.

Telia said the arrangement grants it full operational control across physical access to data management, helping to ensure AI cloud services operate under Swedish jurisdiction and comply with local data sovereignty regulations. The operator will also hold exclusive rights to market and sell these services to enterprise and public sector customers in Sweden.

“We are excited to launch Sweden’s largest sovereign AI initiative with Brookfield," Anders Olsson, head of Telia Sweden, noted in a statement. "Our partnership will enable us to deliver secure end-to-end AI services while strengthening national and European AI capabilities and digital sovereignty. From health care, government and research institutions, to banking and energy, key organizations will be able to deploy AI in their most critical processes where it can generate most value while safeguarding sensitive data.”

"This marks an important milestone in Brookfield’s planned investments in AI infrastructure in Sweden and will help to accelerate the country’s ambitions for AI adoption, as set out in the Swedish AI strategy," Sikander Rashid, head of AI infrastructure and head of Europe for Brookfield, added.

Telia Cygate also onboard

Brookfield had previously planned a land allocation agreement enabling the Strängnäs site to more than double its capacity from 300-megawatts (MW) to 750 MW, with a 10- to 15-year construction process expected behind the project.

The New York-headquartered BAM is the investment arm of Canadian multinational Brookfield Corporation. It has been actively investing in Sweden since 2018, focusing on telecom towers and logistics assets, as well as spreading its reach to France last year with a $23 billion infrastructure investment program, which includes a $11.5 billion investment into what was claimed to be the country's first AI factory. The Cambrai-based site will reportedly create 10-gigawatt (GW) of new capacity, potentially making it Europe’s largest AI infrastructure cluster.

The Sweden project will be delivered with Telia's Cygate system integrator arm leading and managing a secure operations center inside the facilities.

November saw Telia Cygate hone in on sovereign AI with the launch of a hybrid cloud and AI unit in response to an increase in geopolitical turbulence, cybersecurity threats, and European legislation around data management and security. The unit's launch followed a partnership with Accenture to build a Swedish sovereign AI offering to help local businesses move beyond small AI pilots into the big leagues with secure and compliant production-grade systems.

In a recent interview, Accenture's head of technology research for Europe Surya Mukherjee defined AI sovereignty as comprising the entire tech stack.

"Where does the AI decide, what data does it use and, what does it throw up? So those are two layers," Mukherjee told SDxCentral. "Then there's security on a granular, fine level, looking at the model itself: which country produced it, where was it produced?"

Mukherjee pointed to Stanford AI Index research highlighting 70% of the leading large language models (LLMs) were made in the U.S., with 25% in China.

"So that's 95% of the world's models not being produced here in Europe," the Accenture head said. "It's something that you need to think very deeply about as a country as well as a company."