NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang joined the King of Denmark to launch the country’s largest sovereign AI supercomputer, focused on breakthroughs in quantum computing, clean energy, biotechnology and other areas that will benefit Danish society and serve the world.
Denmark’s first AI supercomputer, named Gefion after a goddess from Danish mythology, is an NVIDIA DGX SuperPOD, powered by 1,528 NVIDIA H100 Tensor Core GPUs and interconnected via NVIDIA Quantum-2 InfiniBand networking.
Gefion is managed by the Danish Center for AI Innovation (DCAI), a company founded with funding from the Novo Nordisk Foundation, the world’s richest charitable foundation, and the Export and Investment Fund of Denmark. The new AI supercomputer was symbolically turned on by King Frederick X of Denmark, Jensen and Nadia Carlsten, CEO of DCAI, at an event in Copenhagen.
Jensen spoke with Carlsten, a leader in the quantum computing industry, to discuss the public-private initiative to build one of the world’s fastest AI supercomputers in partnership with NVIDIA.
The Gefion AI supercomputer comes to Copenhagen to serve industry, startups and academia.
“Gefion is becoming an intelligence factory. This is a new industry that has never existed before. It is at the top of the IT industry. We are inventing something fundamentally new,” said Jensen.
The launch of Gefion is an important milestone for Denmark in establishing its own sovereign AI. Sovereign AI can be achieved when a country has the capacity to produce artificial intelligence using its own data, workforce, infrastructure and business networks. Having a supercomputer on national territory provides a foundation for countries to use their own infrastructure to build AI models and applications that reflect their unique culture and language.
“What country can afford not to have this infrastructure, just as every country realizes that you have communications, transportation, healthcare and fundamental infrastructures – the fundamental infrastructure of any country certainly has to be the manufacturer of intelligence,” Jensen said. “The fact that Denmark is one of the few countries in the world that has now launched this vision is truly incredible.”
The new supercomputer is expected to tackle global challenges with insights into infectious diseases, climate change and food security. Gefion is now being readied for users, and a pilot phase will begin with projects looking to use AI to accelerate progress, including in areas such as quantum computing, drug discovery and energy efficiency.
“The era of computer-aided drug discovery must happen within this decade. I hope that what the computer has done for the technology industry, it will also do for digital biology,” said Jensen.
Supporting next-generation breakthroughs with Gefion
The Danish Meteorological Institute (DMI) is participating in the pilot and wants to provide faster and more accurate weather forecasts. It promises to reduce forecast times from hours to minutes, while significantly reducing the energy footprint required for these forecasts compared to traditional methods.
Researchers at the University of Copenhagen are using Gefion to implement and run a large-scale distributed simulation of quantum computer circuits. Gefion allows the simulated system to increase from 36 to 40 entangled qubits, bringing it close to what is known as ‘quantum supremacy’, or outperforming a traditional computer while using fewer resources.
The University of Copenhagen, the Technical University of Denmark, Novo Nordisk and Novonesis are collaborating on a multimodal basic genomic model for discoveries in disease mutation analysis and vaccine design. Their model will be used to improve signal detection and functional understanding of genomes, enabled by the ability to train LLMs on Gefion.
Startup Go Autonomous is seeking training time at Gefion to develop an AI model that understands and uses multimodal input of both text, layout and images. Another startup, Teton, is building an AI Care Companion with large video pre-training, using Gefion.
Tackling global challenges with leading supercomputers
The Gefion supercomputer and the continued collaboration with NVIDIA will position Denmark, with its renowned research community, to pursue the world’s leading scientific challenges with enormous social impact and large-scale projects across all sectors.
Gefion allows researchers to collaborate with industry experts at NVIDIA to co-develop solutions to complex problems, including pharmaceutical and biotechnology research and protein design using the NVIDIA BioNeMo platform.
Scientists will also collaborate with NVIDIA on fault-tolerant quantum computing using NVIDIA CUDA-Q, the open-source hybrid quantum computing platform.
