Pharmaceutical giant Novo Nordisk (NVO) plans to use Denmark’s first sovereign artificial intelligence (AI) supercomputer—powered by Nvidia (NVDA) technology—for drug discovery.
On Wednesday, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang and King Frederik X of Denmark unveiled “Gefion”: a supercomputer named after a goddess in Danish mythology and equipped with 1,528 Nvidia GPUs. Sovereign AI refers to a nation’s capabilities to produce artificial intelligence using its own infrastructure, data, workforce and business networks, Nvidia said.
“The era of computer-aided drug discovery must be within this decade,” Huang said in a news release. “I’m hoping that what the computer did to the technology industry, it will do for digital biology.”
The Novo Nordisk Foundation owns the supercomputer, and Novo Nordisk — the company behind popular weight-loss drugs Ozempic and Wegovy— will be among the first to use it. The foundation owns all of Novo Nordisk’s Class A shares, which represent about a quarter of the company’s capital.
Gefion is a ‘Factory of Intelligence’
Nvidia and Denmark are “inventing something fundamentally new,” with the launch of Gefion, Huang said.
“Gefion is going to be a factory of intelligence,” Huang said. “This is a new industry that never existed before. It sits on top of the IT industry.”
Novo Nordisk, along with the University of Copenhagen and others, are building a “genomic foundation model for discoveries in disease mutation analysis and vaccine design,” by training larger language models on Gefion.
Other Gefion pilot projects include a Danish Meteorological Institute effort to deliver faster and more accurate weather forecasts and a University of Copenhagen project to carry out a large-scale simulation of quantum computer circuits.