Since 1907, SKF has been fighting friction in customers' machines with its bearings, seals, lubrication systems, condition monitoring solutions, and services. Less friction means more energy saved, and by reducing it, SKF makes industry smarter, more competitive, and more energy efficient, building a more sustainable future where industry can do more with less. Today, a new dynamic is reshaping how industry overcomes friction. As global digital transformation accelerates, artificial intelligence (AI) is becoming a primary engine for commercial growth, product innovation, and customer value creation.  Harnessing AI in complex industrial environments, however, requires unprecedented computational scale. Training models to understand real-world machine dynamics, friction reduction, and predictive diagnostics demands world-class supercomputing infrastructure, built on a foundation of security, data integrity, and industrial sovereignty. Recognizing that no single organization can build this future alone, leading Swedish enterprises have taken a collaborative approach to digital infrastructure. On 15 October 2026, Sferical AI officially launched Sferical One—a shared AI supercomputer in Sweden built for AstraZeneca, Ericsson, Saab, SEB, Wallenberg Investments, and SKF as a strategic compute partner.

"AI will be a critical component of Swedish industry’s future competitiveness. Sferical One will help some of Sweden’s leading companies stay at the forefront of that development. It is a long-term investment in the capabilities and expertise we will need to compete in the future.”

First announced as a strategic commitment in April 2026, Sferical One provides SKF with dedicated capacity on an NVIDIA DGX SuperPOD powered by 16 NVIDIA DGX GB300 systems. Operating on a sovereign local platform, Sferical One equips SKF to train, fine-tune, and deploy innovation-critical AI workloads at scale, ensuring sensitive engineering data, proprietary design models, and simulation workloads built over SKF's history remain fully protected within European boundaries.

"Sweden has always built great things — a country of ten million produced so many world-changing companies. This shared supercomputer will bolster even more, mobilizing the researchers, entrepreneurs and scientists to build the Swedish AI ecosystem.”

Scaling expertise across the industrial value chain    As SKF becomes a pure-play industrial company, the synergy between rotating equipment expertise and AI serves as a major growth catalyst. It offers a unique opportunity to align advanced computing power with customer needs, transform customer experiences, streamline engineering workflows, and drive growth.

"AI is essential for industrial innovation, and it must be built on the right foundation to reflect our values of security, responsibility, and competitiveness. AI gives us the capability to fundamentally rethink how we interact with our customers. Imagine if we could fight friction by changing how we partner with customers and grow our business with AI?"

From application engineering to field services, this opportunity is on scaling SKF’s deep domain knowledge across the entire lifecycle. By combining proprietary bearing technology, materials science, and machinery diagnostics with sovereign AI models, SKF aims to extend the collective expertise of hundreds of engineers into trusted guidance across millions of customer touchpoints globally.  A practical example of this vision in action is the SKF Product Assistant—an AI tool that helps customers and internal engineering teams instantly navigate product specifications, bearing selection, and complex technical queries. High-performance compute allows SKF to continuously scale such digital tools to support customers across their full design and operational processes.    Protecting IP while accelerating industrial AI innovation    By securing dedicated, sovereign compute in Sweden, SKF can train and fine-tune models locally, while safeguarding the intellectual property, engineering data, and proprietary models developed over its history.  Today, SKF sees opportunities in areas such as customer technical assistance, quality control, engineering optimisation, materials research and product development. Gradually, AI will become an increasingly important enabler of innovation, helping us solve more complex engineering challenges, accelerate R&D and create smarter products and services for our customers.  The platform utilizes open multimodal AI models, such as NVIDIA Nemotron, allowing SKF to inspect model weights, fine-tune models for specific use cases, and run workloads within secure enterprise environments.    Collaborative scale for industrial competitiveness   Sferical One pools investment, computing capacity, and expertise across non-competing industrial sectors. Alongside the hardware platform, SKF will participate in Sferical Labs, a collaborative environment where partner companies jointly develop AI capabilities and share knowledge across industries.

“Sferical One enables the companies to train and run AI models at a larger scale on a sovereign platform. What makes Sferical unique isn’t just the technology, but that several of Sweden’s largest companies share the same infrastructure, develop solutions together and share knowledge across industries. That creates value beyond the infrastructure itself.”

By pairing world-class supercomputing infrastructure with deep rotating equipment expertise, SKF continues to strengthen its technology strategy, helping customers reduce friction, improve operational efficiency, and build a more sustainable industrial future.