Gefion is operated by the Danish Center for AI Innovation (DCAI), a company established with funding from the Novo Nordisk Foundation, the world’s wealthiest charitable foundation, and the Export and Investment Fund of Denmark. The new AI supercomputer was symbolically turned on by King Frederik X of Denmark, Huang and Nadia Carlsten, CEO of DCAI, at an event in Copenhagen.
Huang sat down with Carlsten, a quantum computing industry leader, to discuss the public-private initiative to build one of the world’s fastest AI supercomputers in collaboration with NVIDIA.
The Gefion AI supercomputer comes to Copenhagen to serve industry, startups and academia.
“Gefion is going to be a factory of intelligence. This is a new industry that never existed before. It sits on top of the IT industry. We’re inventing something fundamentally new,” Huang said.
The launch of Gefion is an important milestone for Denmark in establishing its own sovereign AI. Sovereign AI can be achieved when a nation has the capacity to produce artificial intelligence with its own data, workforce, infrastructure and business networks. Having a supercomputer on national soil provides a foundation for countries to use their own infrastructure as they 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 you have communications, transportation, healthcare, fundamental infrastructures — the fundamental infrastructure of any country surely must be the manufacturer of intelligence,” said Huang. “For Denmark to be one of the handful of countries in the world that has now initiated on this vision is really incredible.”
The new supercomputer is expected to address global challenges with insights into infectious disease, climate change and food security. Gefion is now being prepared for users, and a pilot phase will begin to bring in projects that seek to use AI to accelerate progress, including in such areas as quantum computing, drug discovery and energy efficiency.
“The era of computer-aided drug discovery must be within this decade. I’m hoping that what the computer did to the technology industry, it will do for digital biology,” Huang said
