Norwegian telco Telenor has built the country’s first ‘AI factory’, powered by Nvidia GPUs.

Opened in November, the company said the facility enables organizations to process sensitive data securely in Norway whilst also advancing Telenor’s sustainability goals.

AI factory is a broad term for a HPC system. Further details weren’t shared.

Telenor announced a partnership with Nvidia last year; the telco was set to “become a sovereign AI cloud partner” of Nvidia, develop a green AI center for the Nordics, and offer AI solutions based on Nvidia hardware.

Speaking on Nvidia’s AI podcast, Telenor’s CIO and head of the AI factory Kaaren Hilsen, said the facility went from concept to reality in under a year and now serves customers across a number of sectors, including logistics and public services.

While the telco now has external customers, including Hive Autonomy and Capgemini, Hilsen said initially the AI factory was built to support Telenor’s own AI needs.

“We saw this capability [as being] fundamental for Telenor to accelerate its own AI journey,” she said. “Telenor sits on a lot of critical information and data which we need to secure and [make sure] stays within Norway.”

Hilsen did not provide any information about the clusters deployed at the factory but said Telenor is also planning to build a data center in Oslo that will run on renewable energy and repurpose excess heat for district heating in nearby residential buildings.

“While some people say AI can solve climate change, I think with the increasing number of compute power and data centers that are needed, we have to be responsible and build data centers in a sustainable way” she said.

Telenor has partnered with power company Huisman and a renewable energy investor called HitecVision to build the “state of the art, modern” data center.