OTP Bank has selected SambaNova Systems to help build Europe's fastest AI Supercomputer, positioning OTP Group and the Ministry for Innovation and Technology (MIT) of Hungary as European leaders in the modern day space race to a post AI business. The partnership and plan is to create the fastest AI supercomputer in Europe in the coming 100 days in an attempt to leapfrog both Wall Street and Western European competitors in the AI race. OTP Bank is looking to produce an AI system to be used for national research. This research will help to aid the private and public sectors, as well as higher education across all of Central and Eastern Europe in cooperation with the ITM of Hungary. When speaking to Co-founder and CEO of SambaNova Systems, Rodrigo Liang, alongside Marshall Choy, Senior Vice President and Head of Product at SambaNova Systems, it became easier to understand the scale of the project at hand.

In what may be a first, an Eastern European bank is teaming up with the government of Hungary to field an AI supercomputer that will be used to create a large language model of the Hungarian language. OTP Bank, which was founded in Hungary and operates banks across the region, worked out an agreement under which the government provides about half the funding for the supercomputer developed under contract with SambaNova Systems. The government will have access to the system for public and academic research, said Péter Csányi, deputy CEO and head of the digital division at OTP. The contract with SambaNova Systems capitalizes on the Generative Pretrained Transformer (GPT) for generating large language models that SambaNova announced in October, branding it as dataflow-as-a-service. "Building a system like this to run a GPT model is not something any bank has done before," said Marshall Choy, VP of product at SambaNova.