The Gothenburg Artificial Intelligence Alliance (GAIA) is the community behind the GAIA Confernece, the largest conference for applied AI in Sweden. This page has everything you need to cover GAIA—background, key facts, images, and direct press contact.
The Gothenburg Artificial Intelligence Alliance (GAIA) is a Swedish non-profit that connects AI practitioners across industry, academia, and the public sector. Founded in 2018 and rooted in a local community dating back to 2014, GAIA hosts the annual GAIA Conference—a one-day, practitioner-focused event that has grown from 500 attendees in 2018 to around 1,200 in 2026. The conference takes place each spring in Gothenburg and covers applied machine learning, data science, and data engineering, with speakers from organisations such as Apple, Google, Nvidia, Recorded Future, AstraZeneca, Volvo Cars, Zenseact, Ericsson, AI Sweden, and Chalmers University of Technology.
What became western Sweden's largest applied AI conference started with a problem: too many people wanted in. The Machine Learning and Data Science meetup group in Gothenburg, active since 2014, had grown so popular by 2017 that its 60–80-seat events would fill up within minutes. The obvious next step was a conference.
A small group of volunteers—led by Jakob Andersson and Daniel Langkilde and joined by Josef Lindman Hörnlund, Amanda Bowald (then Nilsson), Josefin Scott, and Elin Romare—set out to organise what was essentially a big meetup. They named it GAIA, admitting they picked the abbreviation first and worked backwards to the full name over breakfast at a Gothenburg coffee shop.
The first conference in April 2018 sold out all 500 tickets. By 2019, the organisers had established a proper non-profit and begun to professionalise—with a deliberate set of principles that still define the event. Every talk is selected on content alone; no sponsor gets a speaking slot for paying. The ticket price is kept low enough for students to attend. And the focus stays local: showcasing what Gothenburg's own ecosystem is building, rather than competing with global keynote circuits.
That ethos has proven to be the formula for growth. The conference has scaled to around 1,200 attendees and moved to Svenska Mässan. Speakers from Gothenburg-rooted companies like Recorded Future, Volvo Cars, AstraZeneca, and Zenseact share the stage with representatives from Apple, Google, and Nvidia—a reflection of the depth of AI talent in the region. Yet GAIA remains volunteer-run and non-profit. GAIA has never aimed to be the biggest tech event. The goal has always been to be the most useful one for its community.
2026 GAIA Conference on April 20 at Svenska Mässan
The 2026 edition features keynote speaker Anders Ynnerman (WASP Chairman and Professor at Linköping University) on visual intelligence and AI compute infrastructure, alongside talks on topics ranging from European open-source LLMs (OpenEuroLLM, AI Sweden) and end-to-end autonomous driving (Zenseact) to AI in Gothenburg's public schools (Göteborgs Stad) and humanitarian AI (The Good AI Lab with Doctors Without Borders). Workshops follow on April 21. Full program and tickets at gaia.fish/2026.
The images below are available for editorial use in connection with coverage of GAIA and the GAIA Conference. Please credit the photographer as indicated.
On GAIA's mission:
"GAIA exists because Gothenburg's AI community needed a place to meet that wasn't a sales pitch or an academic seminar. We wanted something by practitioners, for practitioners — affordable enough for students, relevant enough for senior engineers, and grounded in what's actually being built here."
— Jakob Andersson, Co-Founder, GAIA
On the conference and the Gothenburg ecosystem:
"Gothenburg has an extraordinary concentration of AI talent, but it doesn't always get the recognition it deserves. GAIA exists to change that — to show that world-class work is happening here, not just in the capital or in Silicon Valley. We give the same stage to startups and career-changers as we do to the region's industrial giants."
— Jakob Andersson, Co-Founder, GAIA
For press inquiries, interview requests, or media accreditation for the GAIA Conference, contact us at:
Email: press@gaia.fish
We aim to respond within one day. For urgent requests close to the conference date, please note this in your subject line.
Jakob Andersson
