Sweden’s tax authority has ordered six crypto companies operating in Boden to pay nearly 540 million Swedish kronor (approx. $56 million) in additional taxes after finding that the firms used business structures to obtain tax benefits they were not entitled to.
Swedish public broadcaster SVT reported on Sept. 3 that the six companies accounted for most of the latest tax adjustments imposed on crypto businesses following a review by Skatteverket, the Swedish Tax Agency. The authority said some companies had structured their operations in ways that concealed crypto mining activity.
Patrik Lillqvist, head of intelligence at Skatteverket, said the arrangements were designed to secure tax advantages that would not have been available if the businesses had been classified as crypto miners.
“The companies that we have inspected often have a special arrangement to conceal that they are engaged in mining,” Lillqvist said, according to a translation of his remarks. “The purpose is to obtain tax advantages that the companies are not entitled to.”
The latest assessments form part of the agency’s review of the crypto industry between 2024 and 2026. Nine companies have received tax adjustments totaling more than half a billion Swedish kronor during that period, with six of them operating in Boden.
Boden, a city in northern Sweden, has attracted crypto miners for years because of its access to power and data center infrastructure. The region was already home to around 10 crypto mining companies by 2018, when operators were increasingly looking to Sweden as a location for mining facilities.
Tax treatment later became a source of tension between the industry and Swedish authorities. Sweden moved in 2023 to remove electricity tax relief previously available to data centers, a decision that affected Bitcoin miners operating energy-intensive facilities in the country.
The latest Skatteverket cases concern how companies described the nature of their businesses for tax purposes. According to the agency, some firms presented operations in a way that hid their role in creating new units of cryptocurrencies through mining.
SVT’s earlier investigation into Sweden’s crypto industry found in 2024 that companies had deprived the state of around 1 billion Swedish kronor in taxes, with most of the cases concentrated in Boden. The new assessments show that disputes involving the sector continued through 2026.
Lillqvist criticized companies that entered Swedish communities and used arrangements that the authority believes deprived the state of tax revenue.
“You come to a society and steal from it,” he said.
Several companies have challenged Skatteverket’s decisions in court. Sweden’s administrative court and administrative court of appeal have so far sided with the tax authority in the cases they have considered, according to SVT.
Bikupan Datacenter, which has operated in Boden and Robertsfors, is among the companies contesting the tax authority’s position.
The company has been granted corporate restructuring after becoming unable to pay its debts, while its tax dispute has reached Sweden’s Supreme Administrative Court. The case remains under consideration.
Bikupan is connected to HIVE Digital Technologies, whose Swedish operations have been caught in a longer-running disagreement over the tax treatment of its business. HIVE said in March that it was scaling down Bitcoin mining at its Boden facility as it challenged the way Swedish tax rules were being applied to the operation.
Johanna Törnblad, CEO of Bikupan Datacenter and HIVE’s Sweden country manager, rejected Skatteverket’s assessment of the company’s historical operations.
“When it comes to the historical operations of the Bikupa companies, we do not share the Swedish Tax Agency’s assessment,” Törnblad told SVT by email.
She said Bikupan’s restructuring application explains the company’s position that crypto mining itself was performed by external mining pools that were independent of the HIVE group.
Under the company’s account of its business model, the Bikupa entities sold computing capacity, or computing power, which could be used for workloads including artificial intelligence.
The distinction has become more relevant to HIVE’s plans for its Swedish infrastructure as the company moves resources toward high-performance computing and artificial intelligence.
Crypto.news previously reported in June that HIVE generated record fiscal 2026 revenue of $298 million while expanding its AI computing business. Its high-performance computing operation generated $19.5 million during the fiscal year, up 94% from $10 million a year earlier, while contracted annual recurring revenue from its BUZZ HPC unit reached $35 million.
HIVE reported 440 megawatts of global power capacity across Canada, Sweden and Paraguay at the end of the fiscal year. Its installed Bitcoin mining hashrate increased from 6.5 exahashes per second to 25.1 EH/s during the same period, although the company’s Bitcoin holdings fell to 150 BTC as of March 31.
Part of its AI expansion has involved repurposing infrastructure that was originally used for crypto mining. The company has been converting its Boden facility into a Tier 3 liquid-cooled high-performance computing data center designed to support 2,000 Nvidia GPUs.
The company had already disclosed plans in November 2025 to retrofit the Boden site from a Tier I mining facility into a liquid-cooled Tier III+ high-performance computing center, while expanding GPU infrastructure in Canada.
HIVE’s dispute with Swedish authorities has continued while Bikupan deals with its tax liabilities and restructuring proceedings. The company maintains that its historical Swedish entities provided computing power while independent external mining pools carried out the actual crypto mining.
Skatteverket has maintained the opposite position in its assessments, treating the reviewed operations as mining activity and arguing that the structures used by the companies gave them tax advantages for which they did not qualify. Bikupan’s challenge to that assessment remains before the Supreme Administrative Court.
