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Pens for the diabetes drug Ozempic sit on a production line to be packaged at the Danish drugmaker Novo Nordisk's site in Hillerod, Denmark.
How Ozempic is funding an AI supercomputer
The Danish company Novo Nordisk has gotten rich off of the success of Ozempic and Wegovy — two variants of the revolutionary drug called semaglutide that’s used for diabetes and weight loss respectively under different brand names. Since 2020, the company’s stock price has quadrupled. One of the biggest beneficiaries has been the Novo Nordisk Foundation, the pharmaceutical giant’s charitable arm and its largest shareholder.
Now, with all of that Ozempic money, the Novo Nordisk Foundation — along with Denmark’s Export and Investment fund — is bankrolling a new AI supercomputer called Gefion, which launched on Oct. 23 and is run by a new company called the Danish Centre for AI Innovation. Gefion, named for a Norse goddess, is a $100 million, 30-ton computer the size of a basketball court and, according to the Wall Street Journal, will serve Denmark’s researchers, entrepreneurs, and companies across sectors. The machine runs on 1,528 of Nvidia’s top chips — and Nvidia’s CEO Jensen Huang was present for the computer’s opening in October.
Pharmaceutical companies like Novo Nordisk are especially interested in AI because it promises to simulate massive amounts of data, find new protein structures, and help discover new drugs. For Novo Nordisk, and its Danish bakers, they simply hope the success of Ozempic can jump-start additional innovation — and maybe even medical breakthroughs.