Norway's 2 petabytes of Huawei flash storage and LLM training

7e

2 PB? They will not come close to training in on that amount. Maybe years from now.

jauntywundrkind

384 core cpu cluster? 2 petabytes? Dell just launched a 2U that fits almost 10 petabytes in it. It's probably not 384 core capable but that is very doable right now, Epyc chips are 192 cores each! https://www.techradar.com/pro/dell-launches-record-shatterin...

Den_VR

> He asserted that any country with its own language that did not have a sovereign LLM trained in that language was at a disadvantage as a globally trained, English-speaking LLM would not know about that country’s history, news and culture that was described in the local language. I don’t know this is true. But whatever sounds true enough and gets funding seems to be what flies these days.

ipsum2

This is how much storage the average r/datahoarder user has in their basement. Fewer than 100 hard drives.

Levitz

>As Husnes put it; Norway is a small country solving a problem every non-English-speaking nation will face: how do you build AI that reflects your language, your culture and your history? AI needs custodians, not just builders. I'm afraid the answer is, mostly you don't. Such a thing requires strong political will that, at least in my environment, seems basically impossible to align. The costs are prohibitive, but beyond that, the type of person who cares about local representation like that is either completely fine with letting foreign companies implement it (after all, you can use ChatGPT in Basque if you want to) or is against the idea of AI altogether.

kreyenborgi

Ad for Huawei?

solenoid0937

> The Olivia system is an HPE Cray Supercomputing EX system, with 448 GPUs and 64,512 CPU cores. Training a sovereign LLM with this meager hardware as opposed to a LORA on some open source model seems like a huge mistake and a potential red flag. There is no way these people have the resources to train a fully fledged LLM, so claiming that is their goal makes me think they don't intend for the LLM to be useful. Which begs the question, whose money are they wasting - and why?

kvam

As a Norwegian this sounds like a mistake. Who will use this LLM? Where? For what? The underlying data could be made more easily searchable and digestible for agents in general if the goal is better knowledge of Norwegian culture.

TrackerFF

I'm a Norwegian, and I use the national library almost every day for searching through texts. They have truly one of the best working user interfaces (and functionality) for searching through the massive amounts of text.

dalemhurley

How about that, they actually asked for permission to use data and the companies said yes.

arjie

This can’t be right. 2 PB of flash is like $200k. It’s within reach of many individuals. Then again I guess you don’t need that much storage so maybe it is.

timmg

I wonder if instead (or in parallel), Norway should build a set of training data and share it (for free) with all the model builders. Seems like making the frontier models know Norwegian and their culture is a better (or additional!) way to reach the end they are going for here.

hank808

Ehhh. None of this sounds right. Translation problems maybe. Lack or technical detail understanding maybe... I don't know. Probably not news.

dzhiurgis

That's about 350MB per capita. Humans can produce 2-6kb per hour. That's 13 years of non-stop typing. Wonder where it all comes from. I guess it's websites that aren't compressed / extracted.

KeplerBoy

How true is this statement: "He asserted that any country with its own language that did not have a sovereign LLM trained in that language was at a disadvantage as a globally trained, English-speaking LLM would not know about that country’s history, news and culture that was described in the local language." I thought all big players already train on basically everything remotely available to them no matter the language or quality, so his take sounds like an opinion formed in the early days of generally available LLMs.

dakolli

Even entire governments are captured by a mild LLM psychosis. Which is sad in the case of Norway. I lived in Norway for two years and always found their government to be highly rational, this is not a rational use of public funds (but I suppose they have plenty of capital). Western society is completely captured by this form of psychosis and its going to bite us in the a* very soon. I firmly believe all the Boomer leaders throughout the world are being sold a bag of lies by technocrats that "AI", specifically LLMs, are going to cure disease and death and therefor they are willing to handover all control to the technocrats. Fckin croakers at it again.

yanhangyhy

so now Huawei is not a threat to 'democracy' anymore?

rafram

> Marius Husnes, the Head of IT Platform at the library (Nasjonlbiblioteket) discussed the project at Huawei’s ID Forum 2026 in Paris, saying that no commercial LLM provider was developing a local (Norwegian) language LLM. He asserted that any country with its own language that did not have a sovereign LLM trained in that language was at a disadvantage as a globally trained, English-speaking LLM would not know about that country’s history, news and culture that was described in the local language. I am not overly confident that Marius Husnes knows what he’s talking about here.

seanvk

The Welsh language getting LLM training with Nemotron https://www.bangor.ac.uk/news/2025-09-15-reaching-across-the...

6510

What is called culture here will increasingly be propaganda. It reminds me of people cheering twitter as a replacement of RSS or using facebook to communicate with your customers rather than email. You won't know which will be the winning company, don't know who might control it in the future and we cant predict what it will cost. It doesn't take much to be very annoying.