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What just happened? Nvidia founder and CEO Jensen Huang joined King Frederik X of Denmark to inaugurate the country's first sovereign AI supercomputer. Called 'Gefion,' it's being billed as something with the potential to revolutionize fields like quantum computing, drug discovery, and climate modeling.
Gefion is an Nvidia DGX SuperPOD featuring 1,528 of the company's cutting-edge H100 Tensor Core GPUs working in tandem over the Quantum-2 InfiniBand interconnect. It's poised to be Denmark's engine for artificial intelligence breakthroughs.
The launch event in Copenhagen had the air of a symbolic torch passing, with Jensen Huang and King Frederik X of Denmark meeting on stage to connect a pair of fat wires together to mark the computer's powering up.
Huang proudly declared, "Gefion is going to be a factory of intelligence [...] We're inventing something fundamentally new."
Denmark is investing in AI to establish its own "sovereign AI," which essentially refers to a nation's capacity to produce AI with its own data, infrastructure, workforce, and business networks. The launch of Gefion will help further that goal.
As noted in the press release highlighting the launch, Huang thinks sovereign AI capabilities are now essential national infrastructure, just as vital as transportation or healthcare systems.
"What country can afford not to have this infrastructure, just as every country realizes you have communications, transportation, healthcare, fundamental infrastructures – the fundamental infrastructure of any country surely must be the manufacturer of intelligence," he stated.
As for why a nation would actually need such a system, Nvidia touts multiple potential applications, from decoding climate patterns and infectious diseases, to streamlining drug discovery and energy systems.
The Danish Meteorological Institute is one of the first pilot users, hoping Gefion's horsepower can slash weather forecasting times from hours to minutes while drastically reducing energy usage compared to traditional methods.
Meanwhile, researchers at the University of Copenhagen will also get a slice of the system to simulate large-scale quantum computer circuits with up to 40 entangled qubits, bringing them closer to the coveted "quantum supremacy" milestone.
As for cost, the Gefion ate up a 700 million Danish kroner investment, equal to around $98 million. The Novo Nordisk Foundation supplied the lion's share at 600 million kroner, with the Export and Investment Fund of Denmark adding another 100 million.
Nvidia's work in AI hardware has transformed the chipmaker into a tech juggernaut that recently exceeded the market caps of titans like Apple and Microsoft for a brief period of time. This AI boom has also massively enriched Huang himself, elevating him to the ranks of the world's wealthiest people.
Perhaps that's why King Frederik seemed to revel in Huang's rockstar aura, quipping "I can feel that I am not the only king in this room [...] I think the other one has a leather jacket on. And I think it's cool to have you here, Jensen."
Image credit: Nvidia