The University of Southern Denmark (SDU) has announced that its new national AI supercomputer in Sønderborg has been brought online.

The supercomputer, dubbed Bitten, was built in partnership with Danfoss and HPE. The facility was designed to serve researchers and students across the Danish university system through UCloud, a sovereign research cloud platform developed by SDU, Aalborg University, and Aarhus University. According to the partners, access to the system will also be extended to startups and university spin-offs for development and testing purposes.

The facility utilizes a liquid cooling system and has been installed with a waste heat reuse system, with the recovered heat fed into Sønderborg Municipality’s district heating system as part of the city’s goal of reaching full CO2 neutrality.

“Digital infrastructure is a strategic resource for both research and education. Researchers and students now have much better opportunities to work with larger datasets and more advanced models across institutions than has previously been practically possible in a shared Danish infrastructure,” said Professor Claudio Pica, director of the SDU eScience Centre.

Sune Tornbo Baastrup, CIO at Danfoss, said the project was intended as a wider proof of concept: “We have created a unique supercomputing solution that contributes positively across several areas: it delivers both high computational power and acts as an active part of the energy system… Ultimately, this serves as inspiration, demonstrating that sustainability, technological development, and commercially attractive initiatives can go hand in hand.”

The data center was built using HPE’s AI Mod POD service, which allows customers to deploy modular data centers that support AI workloads.