"When she decided to uproot her life and move halfway across the world to run a company in a place where she had never lived, Nadia Carlsten wasn't really sure what to expect.
But the American engineer with a passion for technology management definitely wasn't expecting to be treated like a celebrity.
"I feel like the most popular person wherever I go," Carlsten says. "I can just start the conversation with: I have over 1,500 GPUs -- and everyone wants to talk to me."
Carlsten has precisely 1,528 of the most powerful graphics-processing units on the planet because she just started as the chief executive of the Danish Centre for AI Innovation. The new company was built to run Denmark's national AI supercomputer, which opened last week with a glitzy launch party where Carlsten was once again the center of attention.
She even found herself on a stage surrounded by royalty. To her left was Frederik X, the king of Denmark. To her right was Jensen Huang, the king of AI.
Nvidia's visionary CEO was there to plug in a machine that happens to be unlike any of the others that he's brought to life.
There are plenty of supercomputers that owe their existence to Nvidia's chips. But what makes this one different is that it's also powered by Novo Nordisk's weight-loss drugs.
Two of the world's most important companies are now in a partnership born from the success of their most revolutionary products. The supercomputer was built with technology from Nvidia -- and money from the Novo Nordisk Foundation. The charitable organization has become supremely wealthy as the largest shareholder in Novo Nordisk, which means this project was made possible by the breakthrough drugs that have sent the Danish company's stock price soaring.
To put it another way, it's the first AI supercomputer funded by Ozempic.
It was named Gefion after the goddess of Norse mythology who turned her sons into oxen so they could plow the land that would become Denmark's largest island. As it turns out, that's the plan for Gefion the AI supercomputer: to take something and turn it into something else entirely.
"In time, you'll discover that it's not a data center," Huang said at the supercomputer's ceremonial unveiling. "It's a factory of intelligence."
Whatever you call it, Gefion is a beast. It is bigger than a basketball court. It weighs more than 30 tons. It took six months to manufacture and install. It also required an investment of $100 million.
That funding came from a public-private initiative between the Novo Nordisk Foundation and the state-owned Export and Investment Fund of Denmark.
The advanced chips made by Nvidia are the most precious resource of our time, so prohibitively expensive and scarce that most researchers can't afford them and couldn't get their hands on them anyway.
But insufficient access to computing power is a barrier to innovation. The point of the Gefion investment was to bulldoze that roadblock for Danish businesses and researchers so they can accelerate progress in fields like healthcare, biotechnology and quantum computing.
When it's fully operational, the AI supercomputer will be available to entrepreneurs, academics and scientists inside companies like Novo Nordisk, which stands to benefit from its help with drug discovery, protein design and digital biology.
And the birth of Gefion was such a momentous occasion that Huang made sure he was there in his signature black leather jacket.
"This is the first time I've ever been in a room where there are probably many Jensens," he cracked.
"Welcome to Denmark," Carlsten said.
Carlsten, 41, moved there only a few months ago herself. She had a sparkling resume: Ph.D. in engineering from Berkeley, innovation work for the U.S. government, management experience at Amazon and Google spinout SandboxAQ. What she didn't have was any personal connections to Denmark. "People assume I do," Carlsten said, "because my name sounds vaguely Danish."
She knew from previous trips to Copenhagen that the city was beautiful, the people friendly and the cardamom buns irresistible. But she was drawn there by something else that she couldn't resist: the chance to run the business of an AI supercomputer.
The most exciting job she could imagine was across the ocean because that's where Novo Nordisk has very quickly become the most valuable company in all of Europe -- more valuable than LVMH or Hermes, and nearly as valuable as Coca-Cola and PepsiCo combined.
The company's blockbuster weight-loss drugs, Ozempic and Wegovy, have driven that dramatic shift in market value, which has transformed the philanthropic organization that owns more than 25% of Novo Nordisk's shares.
In fact, the drugs that have made people much slimmer have made the Novo Nordisk Foundation's purses much, much fatter.
Over the past five years, as demand for the drugs boomed and profits soared, the nonprofit foundation doubled its annual grant awards. The foundation's investment arm now controls more than $160 billion in assets -- and it's using that money to make increasingly ambitious bets.
One of them is a bet on what Huang has begun calling sovereign AI. He says more countries like Denmark are realizing that "data is their natural and national resource" and building out the infrastructure to produce artificial intelligence with it and supercharge their economies. Of course, that infrastructure depends on Nvidia, so take it with a gigantic fjord of salt.
But one person who shares his view of AI's potential is Mads Krogsgaard Thomsen, the CEO of the Novo Nordisk Foundation, a job he began after 20 years as Novo Nordisk's chief scientific officer.
Until now, researchers exploring scientific frontiers in search of novel drugs were limited by sheer computational firepower. For decades, Thomsen could only dream about machines processing unthinkable amounts of data in the hopes of improving people's health.
And then Carlsten, Huang and the king of Denmark plugged in Gefion and plowed a road to the future." [1]
There is no place for Lithuania in the future. 100 million dollars is a pittance for Lithuania. Every year, we Lithuanians spend billions of dollars to buy things that explode. After that we do exercises, there are loud "booms", and we laugh with satisfaction.
1. EXCHANGE --- Science of Success: It's a Giant New Supercomputer That Might Transform an Entire Country --- Nvidia's chips power it. Novo Nordisk's blockbuster drugs paid for it. Cohen, Ben. Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y.. 02 Nov 2024: B.2.
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