Data Sovereignty & Local-First AI: Building Eldrim with Erik Stenman

On Christmas Eve, the BEAM's scheduler throttled down to save power. A batch job arrived. A Christmas worth of XML took down all three failover nodes. The Klarna CEO called. Erik Stenman was already at his desk.

That incident sent him deep into the BEAM runtime — and eventually led to the BEAM Book. Now he's applying the same habit of asking where resources really go to a different question: where does AI compute actually run, and who controls it?

Erik Stenman (known as Happi) has been with Erlang since 1994. He wrote the BEAM Book, built Klarna's payment core, and is now building Eldrim — a sovereign AI compute router based in northern Sweden that guarantees your model calls stay within the jurisdiction you define.

Topics include:

• the Christmas Eve scar: how scheduler throttling, a batch job, and a 20-reduction XML conversion took down all three Klarna nodes simultaneously — and why that incident eventually became the BEAM Book
• the three concepts everyone confuses: data residency (where your data sleeps), data sovereignty (who holds the keys), and local-first (keeping the primary copy close)
• why "my provider has an EU region" is not the same as EU sovereignty — and why an Amazon data center in Sweden is still subject to US law
• the US Cloud Act and China's national intelligence law: why both reach companies regardless of where their servers are physically located
• what Eldrim actually does: an OpenAI-compatible API router that enforces jurisdiction rules, fails with a 503 rather than routing quietly outside approved boundaries, and returns headers telling you exactly where and on which server your request ran
• open weight models and the myth of portability — why you never get the same answer twice, and why licenses complicate things further
• district heating in northern Sweden: how a data center in Haparanda can pipe waste heat under the streets instead of dumping it as a climate problem
• the sustainability-as-sovereignty argument — and why where you run compute is now also an environmental decision
• what a developer shipping Elixir and calling a model API can do today

Companion episodes: local-first with Brooklyn Zelenka and Robert Virding; BlueSky's data plane with Chris Beck; Hologram with Bart Blast.

Recorded October 2, 2026.

Resources mentioned:

• eldrim.ai
• happyhacking.blog — Erik's writing
• The BEAM Book