Peter Carlsson is Co-founder and former CEO of Northvolt, the European battery manufacturing company that raised more than $13 billion to build a homegrown battery supply chain for Europe, before filing for bankruptcy at the end of 2024. Before Northvolt, Carlsson spent more than a decade at Ericsson building global supply chains and later served as VP of Supply Chain at Tesla during the launch of the Model S.

In this live episode of Inevitable from the AENU Summit in Berlin, Carlsson reflects on the rise and fall of Northvolt, the realities of competing with China’s electro-industrial stack, and what Europe still gets right in manufacturing and innovation. Peter breaks down why batteries became strategically essential to Europe, what operational challenges slowed Northvolt’s scale-up, and how changing EV markets, policy shifts, and financing pressures compounded those problems.

Carlsson also mentions his new ventures: Aris Machina, an agentic operating system for manufacturing and Sonder Labs, a sodium-ion battery company focused on building chemistry and supply chains less dependent on China. He talks about AI-driven manufacturing, industrial automation, battery geopolitics, and where Europe can still compete in the next generation of energy and hardware systems. 

Episode recorded on April 28 2026 (Published on May 19, 2026). 

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*Editing and post-production work for this episode was provided by The Podcast Consultant