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Norway's 2 petabytes of Huawei flash storage and LLM training
- hottrends 6mo ago[flagged]
- 7e 6mo ago2 PB? They will not come close to training in on that amount. Maybe years from now.
- huflungdung 6mo ago[dead]
- Den_VR 6mo agoCould probably LoRA with that
- sgt 6mo agoThink they will not train on the dull 2TB but use that as the data lake to start and then apply a more targeted approach.
- winddude 6mo agoif you read the article 2pb is available as flash storage in the data pipeline, used to dedupe, clean, normalize, etc, for training from 60pb of raw data.
- jauntywundrkind 6mo ago384 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-shattering-server-with-9-8pb-of-flash-storage-in-just-2u-paving-the-way-for-massive-usd75-million-200pb-ai-data-center-racks https://www.techradar.com/pro/dell-launches-record-shatterin...
- 100ms 6mo ago5x 400gbit running to a 2U box whoa, the PCI lanes must have heat shielding. More seriously there is a sensibility limit on extreme density where it's not needed. The idea that you're just going to magically get 2 TBit/s out of those ports seems unlikely even with tweaked software, and you're stuck with a power and comms hotspot that's liable to dictate the remainder of your network design. At max utilisation that 2U would take 12 hours to drain, and only 12 hours assuming peak and likely unachievable throughput and the box otherwise being completely out of service. Not a great start
- abujazar 6mo agoThat's the in-house preprocessing hardware, not what they're training on.
- jauntywundrkind 6mo agoYes! It's still a weird article, to highlight a "big" storage appliance. Having all that NVMe local feels like it would be much much much much faster.
- Den_VR 6mo ago> 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.
- redanddead 6mo agoThey made the cultural case, you have no idea how strong this is in places like quebec, nordics, france, russia etc
- sgt 6mo agoCan confirm that. Norway may have a small population, but if you live there you'll think it's truly the center of the world (aside from the US. Norwegians love America)
- ipsum2 6mo agoThis is how much storage the average r/datahoarder user has in their basement. Fewer than 100 hard drives.
- arjie 6mo agoBut not in flash. I have an appreciable fraction of that but in spinning rust.
- Levitz 6mo ago>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.
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- WarmWash 6mo agoI'm sure if Norway approached the American labs with goal of making a curated datasets for training, they would absolutely get in the training door, and those models would likely run circles around anything that could be domestically done. That being said though, I can feel you cringing through the screen.
- Levitz 6mo ago>That being said though, I can feel you cringing through the screen. Then I failed to express myself in writing. I'm definitely a fan of this kind of initiative and am not happy with the type of viability I think they have. I might very well be projecting a whole lot of local dynamics of national identity, politics and culture though.
- ttkari 6mo agoI guess it's subject to debate whether the cost indeed is prohibitive in the case of Norway. They are a small but extremely wealthy country - after all, they currently hold the equivalent of 1,5% of all the listed companies globally through the investments of their sovereign wealth fund.
- kvam 6mo agoAs 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.
- spwa4 6mo agoExactly, if there's one thing transformers are good at it's translation. One I've found particularly nice: any question ChatGPT can answer in English it can answer in French. I'm assuming Norwegian too. So there's no point.
- sgt 6mo agoThere's quite a bit more to culture and language than just being able to have transformers come up with believable language and/or dialect.
- otabdeveloper4 6mo agoThey're only good at it because they were trained on massive amounts of English and French data.
- vidarh 6mo agoNot really true. Both Claude and ChatGPT can translate into minor dialects of Norwegian they will have seen very few works in because very few printed works exist in them. E.g. I've tested both my local spoken dialect, which is rarely written, and a sociolect used by a 1970's Maoist group consiting of a few hundred people, where most of the printed material consists of novels from a couple of ex-members that became authors. In the latter case, it claimed to not know, but was able to get a good match from just a description. I also just had it ape Norwegian orthography from the 1910's by having it look up the rules and translate a text it had first translated from English to modern Norwegian, and it did just fine. They will have seem some work in these dialects, but mostly it transfer really well to know related languages (English, Dutch, German, Swedish, Danish, roughly form a continuum from least in common to most in common with modern Norwegian; they all share vocabulary and significant parts of grammar with Norwegian), and then a relatively limited exposure to Norwegian itself is sufficient to do fairly well. They're also really good at "style transfer" of text in the form of tweaking orthography, word order, and minor grammar changes from descriptions and examples. (incidentally, the latter is one way of getting an LLM to sound a lot less like an LLM)
- kreyenborgi 6mo agoAd for Huawei?
- solenoid0937 6mo ago> 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?
- sgt 6mo agoThat's what they have access to right now. I am sure that will change in the future as the project progresses. What do you suggest, that they stop and wait until they have the right HW?
- NonHyloMorph 6mo agoAlso, it's Norway... "Norway's sovereign wealth fund, officially known as the Government Pension Fund Global, is the world's largest sovereign wealth fund with assets exceeding \(\$2\) trillion. Established in 1990 and managed by Norges Bank Investment Management, it was created to channel surplus petroleum revenues into long-term global investments to benefit future generations."
- otabdeveloper4 6mo ago> meager hardware Qwen was made on a cluster about that size. And this is before anybody ever thought about optimizing the training process. (Currently it's just pytorch analyst-as-coder slop, with extremely overprovisioned quantizations, etc.)
- kristjansson 6mo agoDeepSeek claims to have trained on something like 2k H800, this is ~0.5k GH200 … it’s not nothing. Sure they’re not going to _serve_ it at scale, but that’s not the point? Also the line between “finetuning a base model” and “man this is a real good initialization” gets pretty blurry at scale. Altogether a pretty presumptuous take.
- 6mo ago
- TrackerFF 6mo agoI'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.
- vidarh 6mo agoIt's really fantastic. I just wished there were fewer restrictions on the content that is accessible. (a lot is only accessible from Norwegian IP addresses, so it's one of the main reasons I maintain a VPN as I'm Norwegian but live in the UK; a second set is only available from the IP addresses of libraries or research institutions - still huge amounts that are generally available, though)
- mettamage 6mo agoSilly question but can a non-Norwegian also access it? Willing to pick up some Norwegian along the way ;-)
- Telaneo 6mo agoIf you have access to a Norwegian IP, then yes.
- vidarh 6mo agoYou can access quite a bit directly. Check out nb.no (or https://www.nb.no/en/ https://www.nb.no/en/ for an English version of the page, but of course most of the works are in Norwegian) There are escalating series of restrictions, basically: * Available for everyone. * Available from a Norwegian IP -> just requires a VPN. * Available from Norwegian libraries * Availble under "special conditions". This would mean from a participating research institution or university, or similar. Pretty much everything that is out of copyright falls in the first category. The second and third categories has a bunch of copyrighted material where the copyright holders have granted limited usage rights. A bunch of newspaper archive material that is still under copyright (but sadly not the biggest ones) are available from Norwegian IPs for example.
- dalemhurley 6mo agoHow about that, they actually asked for permission to use data and the companies said yes.
- vintermann 6mo agoI think you're required by law to let the National Library have copies of books/newspapers you publish beyond a certain scale.
- arjie 6mo agoThis 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.
- devttyeu 6mo agoMore like $1M at current prices at this scale / level of performance. If you go with HDD arrays probably $50k
- arjie 6mo agoBoy pricing is pretty nuts these days. I have half a petabyte in Seagate enterprise drives myself and I didn’t pay anything close to that to acquire it. Such a pity about the flash storage. 2 years ago we built 200 TiB or something of flash using Samsung PM1633 or something and it was a fraction of the cost per gigabyte that $1m would imply.
- rcbdev 6mo agoWe're in the boom phase of the cycle. The bust on these chips always comes.
- metadat 6mo agoYour numbers are a little off but the point remains- 2PB is nothing, not newsworthy imo. What’s special about this?
- vidarh 6mo agoWhat's special about it is not the flash but training an LLM based on the content, much of which is still in copyright and which the library has restrictions on how they are allowed to use (irrespective of the legal position of training on it) and which required an agreement with the copyright holders.
- tjwebbnorfolk 6mo agoAlso my first thought: "Is that... a lot?" You can put 6PB (244TB * 24) into a single box these days.
- timmg 6mo agoI 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.
- vidarh 6mo agoThe frontier models know Norwegian just fine. They can also adapt to Norwegian dialects, and even ape old Norwegian fairly well. E.g. I had Claude describe the novel "De knyttede næver" from 1911 in Norwegian orthography ca. 1911, as it's a novel I've read, and it does a good job. What it lacks is an understanding of Norwegian literature, culture and history. It had to look up "De knyttede næver", which was one of the best-selling Norwegian novels around the time it was published before I'd get anything out of it (ChatGPT does better; in thinking mode in particular it gives a detailed summary). While not exactly well known today, the author was a prominent newspaper journalist for decades, and the novel series is well enough known that e.g. there's a Norwegian singer that took his stage name after the protagonist, and it was covered in Norwegian papers and books for decades (partly because of controversy over the authors political views and how they coloured his novels), so it does feel like a reasonable test that reveals a quite significant knowledge gap. I do agree with you that it'd be better if the data set from the national library was made more accessible, though it seems a major addition here is that they have a deal to train on copyrighted data locked away in their archives that they have limitations on the use of. But even just making the out of copyright data in their collections would be a great start.
- e12e 6mo agoOdd, I'd imagine Wikisource (in many/all languages) would be part of training data for all LLMs with SOTA ambition? https://no.wikisource.org/wiki/De_knyttede_n%C3%A6ver https://no.wikisource.org/wiki/De_knyttede_n%C3%A6ver
- vidarh 6mo agoYou'd think so. It seems like there are a lot of odd gaps like that. I also have a favourite English language PhD thesis I ask every new model about that they still struggle to find even though there's a Wikipedia article about it that links a blog post I wrote about it. Anyone who thinks they've exhausted even publicly crawlable resources should ask them about some obscure stuff.
- hank808 6mo agoEhhh. None of this sounds right. Translation problems maybe. Lack or technical detail understanding maybe... I don't know. Probably not news.
- dzhiurgis 6mo agoThat'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.
- vidarh 6mo agoIt's a legal deposit library, same as e.g. Library of Congress. Which means almost every published book, magazine, and newspaper and many other works published in Norway, as well as large collections of Norwegian works published abroad (such as thousands of Norwegian-language newspapers published by the Norwegian immigrant communities in the US) for many decades and a large proportion of the same from the last 200+ years are stored there. They do also crawl websites (or at least did) in the .no tld.
- huss-mo 6mo ago[flagged]
- KeplerBoy 6mo agoHow 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.
- WatchDog 6mo agoIf you want LLMs to have knowledge of the Norwegian language, wouldn't the most obvious thing to do be to build a good training dataset and make the dataset widely available? Why go to the expense of training your own model, especially when it will be inferior to state of the art models.
- electroglyph 6mo agoabsolutely. somebody online was wanting an LLM with Georgian language support, and that's exactly what i suggested: start digitizing Georgian text.
- embedding-shape 6mo agoYeah, was about to comment that too, instead of training a new model and new weights exclusively for Norwegian (and expecting/wanting every other small/medium-sized country to do the same) which seems infinity harder, they could have made high quality transcriptions and translations of the stories currently described only in Norwegian into English, and making it all public. I guess there still would be a worry that it'd be counted as "less important" compared to other history, news and culture about other countries.
- makeitdouble 6mo ago> high quality transcriptions and translations of the stories currently described only in Norwegian into English You make it sound like an easier task than training an LLM. I'd argue it's not obvious, and would assume the contrary.
- dakolli 6mo agoEven 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.
- NonHyloMorph 6mo agoI think it is highly rational. You see it from the wrong point of view. It seems to be less a short utilitarian project or economic endeavour, but a cultural one. Think about it more of in terms of applied humanities. Which languages go extinct, which cultures disappear and are superseded by a monocultural globalist hegemony.
- snorremd 6mo agoExactly. Nasjonalbiblioteket (National Library of Norway) has centuries of written material (Bokmål, Nynorsk and some Sami) and decades of audio and video material featuring varied dialects from all over the country. I believe training models that encompass this information can help in preserving both our language, history, and culture for future generations that increasingly turn to AI to get their information.
- yanhangyhy 6mo agoso now Huawei is not a threat to 'democracy' anymore?
- dopa42365 6mo agowhenever Huawei want to buy billions of dollars worth of US licenses and stuff, they stop being a "national security threat" for a while because reasons
- rafram 6mo ago> 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.
- spiderfarmer 6mo agoIt sounds plausible enough to get subsidies.
- idiotsecant 6mo agoYou're making the mistake of thinking whether he knows what he is talking about matters. He is brewing a potion. It's ingredients are a trendy term, a vaguely spooky threat and a clear, overly simplistic solution that of course he will graciously assume control of, for the good of the motherland. This potion is potent and you'd think it would stop working from frequent misuse but you'd be wrong!
- vintermann 6mo agoHe won't have control over it.
- chvid 6mo agoWhen I am chatting with ChatGPT - it is fairly obvious that it is American - its native language, its style, its attitude is American - even if we chat in Danish. Just as we cannot rely on Netflix and HBO to produce Scandinavian TV-shows even though they might do at the moment, we need to make our own stuff in this area too. And over time, the technology to do this will become cheap and readily available for us to do so.
- anal_reactor 6mo ago
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- seanvk 6mo agoThe Welsh language getting LLM training with Nemotron https://www.bangor.ac.uk/news/2025-09-15-reaching-across-the-isles-uk-llm-brings-ai-to-uk-languages-with-nvidia-nemotron https://www.bangor.ac.uk/news/2025-09-15-reaching-across-the...
- 6510 6mo agoWhat 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.
- yokoprime 6mo agoThe wording in this article is a bit strange, why the extreme focus on the brand of storage media? Also, the term LLM seems to be used in a very broad way here, are they actually building a language model from scratch, or are they fine-tuning?
- DeathArrow 6mo agoI thought US has already coerced most countries to not buy hardware from Huawei. At least in my country, Chinese companies have been barred from official tenders and procurement.
- petterroea 6mo agoAs a Norwegian I have never needed a Norwegian language model. Doing most things in Norwegian puts you at a disadvantage internationally anyways. Maybe this has value in schools, but wouldn't it just give kids more trust in relying on LLM's? My friends who work in education report that group work has become insufferable because many do not think critically and ask LLM to verify everything. I really don't see a benefit, but maybe they will find one - that is what research is for. I am reminded that we recently concluded our experiment of forcing things to be digital on school was considered a flop. These things have a cost if we are wrong.
- postepowanieadm 6mo agoNorway isn't in the EU (no restrictions on Huawei) and has cheap electricity, could become an ai powerhouse.
- layer8 6mo agoNorway is in the EEA, which have adopted the existing EU Cybersecurity Act.
- postepowanieadm 6mo agoThank you, I didn't know that.
- Schlagbohrer 6mo agoSapir-Worf hypothesis but for AI
- dmos62 6mo agoHuawei? You'd think that the recent European revulsion from using overseas providers would have reached Norway's public sector too.
- rldjbpin 6mo agomay not be the most efficient way to go about things, but there remains a seemingly obvious use case for non-latin languages to do things from scratch. see sarvam.ai and their tokenisation improvements on local languages [1]. not every llm needs to help with coding, nor it needs to already become Babel fish. language is culture, so i can see the motivation behind their initiative. it must be nice to afford to do this yourself. [1] https://www.sarvam.ai/blogs/sarvam-30b-105b https://www.sarvam.ai/blogs/sarvam-30b-105b
- kgeist 6mo ago>but there remains a seemingly obvious use case for non-latin languages to do things from scratch >see sarvam.ai and their tokenisation improvements on local languages You don't need to build from scratch to improve tokenization, though. Russia's T-Bank was able to increase generation speeds by 1.5-3x by changing a stock Qwen's tokenizer to include 5 times more Cyrillic tokens (+ post-training on a Russian corpus).
- rldjbpin 6mo agothe improvements for sarvam was with the amount of tokens used to represent words in english vs non-english languages. the great thing about the current momentum is that someone can test this hypothesis by applying the T-Bank approach to the same set of languages and compare outcomes. unfortunately not everyone has the same level of respectable compute this easily available. at least those outside of the ZIRP/VC ecosystem of the valley.
- danborn26 6mo agoThis is a massive storage deployment. Given the I/O demands of LLM training, especially for checkpointing, moving to this scale of NVMe flash makes sense compared to traditional disk arrays.
- sspoisk 6mo ago[flagged]
- teknologist 6mo agoModern frontier LLMs know Norwegian. Wouldn't this simply be the job of RAG to do lookups as the user requests for data? Like how Gemini integrates with Google Search. Seems like they should be building an MCP service rather than training an entirely new LLM...
- fastasucan 5mo agoCulture is a lot more than translated language.
- kobie12 5mo ago[flagged]