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

<p>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.</p><p>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?</p><p>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.</p><p>Topics include:</p><ul><li>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</li><li>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)</li><li>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</li><li>the US Cloud Act and China's national intelligence law: why both reach companies regardless of where their servers are physically located</li><li>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</li><li>open weight models and the myth of portability — why you never get the same answer twice, and why licenses complicate things further</li><li>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</li><li>the sustainability-as-sovereignty argument — and why where you run compute is now also an environmental decision</li><li>what a developer shipping Elixir and calling a model API can do today</li></ul><p>Companion episodes: local-first with Brooklyn Zelenka and Robert Virding; BlueSky's data plane with Chris Beck; Hologram with Bart Blast.</p><p>Recorded October 2, 2026.</p><p>Resources mentioned:</p><ul><li>eldrim.ai</li><li>happyhacking.blog — Erik's writing</li><li>The BEAM Book</li></ul