The Novo Nordisk Foundation has allocated up to DKK 50 million to support academic use of the powerful Gefion AI supercomputer. The call is open to researchers affiliated with Danish academic research institutions.
Artificial intelligence (AI) can significantly accelerate research and innovation across various fields, ranging from quantum computing to drug discovery, to societal challenges such as the transition to green energy.
Since its inauguration in October last year, Denmark’s AI supercomputer, Gefion, has served select customers from both private and public sectors in a pilot phase. One notable pilot project involved developing AI-powered models for weather forecasting – a project that has now resulted in a multi-year agreement between Danish Centre for AI Innovation (DCAI), the company who owns and operates Gefion, and the Danish Meteorological Institute (DMI) to develop the next generation of weather models on Gefion.
Gefion has now entered a commercial phase, where users have to pay to access the state-of-the-art supercomputer. However, many academic research groups currently lack the necessary funds to access Gefion as this cost item has typically not been included in the budgets.
To address this, the Novo Nordisk Foundation has introduced a temporary grant programme, allowing researchers affiliated with Danish research institutions to apply for GPU hours on Gefion for academic projects within health, sustainability and the life science ecosystem.
Grants will be awarded as vouchers for a specified number of GPU hours on Gefion.
“Our aim is to make it possible to accelerate research using powerful AI technology. With these grants, we wish to bridge the gap until the research community has included compute costs on their funding budgets. The grants also serve a second purpose, which is to fully utilise the available capacity of Gefion and make it possible for the research community to harvest the value provided by Gefion,” says Lene Oddershede, Senior Vice President for Natural & Technical Sciences at the Novo Nordisk Foundation.
Who is eligible for funding?
To be eligible for a GPU grant from the Novo Nordisk Foundation, applicants must be academic researchers affiliated with Danish research institutions working on a non-commercial project.
To be considered for a GPU grant, the research project must align with the strategy and goals of the Novo Nordisk Foundation, including research areas within health, sustainability and the life science ecosystem.
Both researchers with existing funding from the Novo Nordisk Foundation and those without are encouraged to apply.
Projects must be sufficiently mature to scale their AI workloads to multiple GPUs, which will be assessed on a case-by-case basis during the evaluation process.
As an important note to potential applicants, these grants are not available for for-profit activities in startups or industry. Startups and industry stakeholders are thus advised to seek funding for access to Gefion through other means.
Find more information about the GPU grants here, including the application process. Applications can be submitted from 25. April 2025.
About Gefion
Gefion is an NVIDIA DGX SuperPOD AI supercomputer, powered by 1,528 NVIDIA H100 Tensor Core GPUs and interconnected using NVIDIA Quantum-2 InfiniBand networking. Gefion operates on a commercial basis where customers pay for GPU compute time.
Gefion is the result of a public-private partnership between the Novo Nordisk Foundation and the Export and Investment Fund of Denmark (EIFO), which funded the Danish Centre for AI Innovation A/S (DCAI) that now owns and operates Gefion.
Find more information about Gefion at www.dcai.dk.
