Norway's National Library is building a sovereign LLM for the Norwegian language.
The hardware: an HPE Cray Supercomputing EX system with 448 GPUs and 64,512 CPU cores, backed by 5.3 PB of Cray ClusterStor E1000 storage. Plus 2 PB of Huawei OceanStor Dorado all-flash for the data pipeline. Legal deposit access to every Norwegian book, newspaper, and broadcast ever published.
Today those GPUs are NVIDIA. Tomorrow, given supply chain realities? Could be Ascend. Could be a mix. Sovereign AI means you don't get to pick one vendor and marry it.
Marius Husnes, Head of IT Platform at the National Library, said the quiet part out loud: "Nobody was talking about the problems involved in moving PB-scale datasets from an archive."
He's right. Hardware procurement gets the headlines. The hard part is the orchestration layer - and it has to work across whatever silicon your procurement pipeline can actually deliver.
Here's what every sovereign AI project hits: you buy the accelerators, then you need to share them across teams - training, inference, data processing - without dedicating a $20K chip to each researcher. You need partitioning: hard slicing for multi-tenant safety, soft slicing for density. And you need it to work across NVIDIA today and Ascend tomorrow.
At Dynamia, we just contributed Ascend vNPU partitioning to CNCF-backed HAMi v2.9:
- Hard slicing: dedicated AICores isolated HBM, enforced at the hardware level. Multi-tenant safe.
- Soft slicing (HAMi-core): ACL interception via LD_PRELOAD. 10 pods per card. For trusted workloads where density wins.
Same Kubernetes control plane across NVIDIA and Ascend. Same scheduling logic. Vendor-agnostic by design. Sovereign infrastructure can't afford vendor lock-in.
"AI needs custodians, not just builders." The custodial layer is the software that makes any accelerator governable, regardless of whose logo is on the chip.