As digital infrastructure grows, so too does its environmental impact. Data centers, essential to cloud computing and AI, consume vast amounts of energy and require effective cooling systems. Airon.ai is addressing this challenge with cutting-edge, climate-conscious design. In this article, we interview Robert Lidberg, co-founder and CEO of Airon.

Rooted in Sweden’s engineering expertise and cold climate advantage, Airon designs next-generation AI data centers that optimize energy use and cost-efficiency, minimizing emissions and relieving constraints on the local power grid. Their decentralized model—building smaller AI data centers in greater numbers—uses a fraction of the energy and space of conventional centers. This makes them especially attractive in urban areas where space is limited, and waste heat can be repurposed for residential heating.

“As a Swedish company, sustainability is naturally embedded as part of the company,” said Lidberg. “But we have to recognize and be reminded about the importance of explaining its benefits. Airon sources 100% carbon-free electricity from hydro, wind, and solar, not just because it’s environmentally responsible, but because these renewables also offer practical advantages—they’re cost-effective and fast to scale, delivering more affordable compute power to our customers. Sustainability is by default.”

Airon’s data centers are built on a bare-metal infrastructure, meaning the entire capacity is exclusively allocated at the hardware level to the customer—single-tenant and not shared. “It combines the strengths of on-premise performance and security with the flexibility of the cloud,” explained Lidberg. “Our bare-metal architecture meets all safety requirements, compliance, and regulations.”

With ambitions to scale in the U.S. market, Airon represents a growing trend of Nordic climate-tech firms exporting sustainable infrastructure models. Their secret? “We manage to build our AI data centers with 30% less build costs than industry standards,” Lidberg said. “I believe this is a good example of Swedish engineering.”

Airon’s innovative approach reflects a broader reimagining of AI infrastructure. “As AI adoption accelerates across every industry, enterprises face a critical bottleneck in keeping up with the exponentially growing need for AI capacity,” Lidberg said. “The market needs for this highly valuable asset, artificial intelligence, are limitless. With Airon, we’ve fundamentally reimagined the entire AI infrastructure supply chain to mass-produce artificial intelligence at large scale, at a low cost, and fast.”

“We are building AI factories that produce artificial intelligence on an industrial scale, and we are just at the beginning of this AI era,” Lidberg added. “Our name, Airon, consists of AI and iron—connected not only to our bare-metal architecture but also to Sweden’s historical legacy of iron production, which evolved into a globally renowned industry. We are looking to do the same with AI.”

In a sector often overlooked in sustainability conversations, Airon shows how small design choices and engineering innovation can yield large environmental and economic gains.