A Swedish physician who helped pioneer chemistry 200 years ago just got another opportunity to innovate. A supercomputer officially christened in honor of Jöns Jacob Berzelius aims to establish AI as a core technology of the next century. Berzelius (pronounced behr-zeh-LEE-us) invented chemistry's shorthand (think H20) and discovered a handful of elements including silicon. A 300-petaflops system now stands on the Linköping University (LiU) campus, less than 70 kilometers from his birthplace in south-central Sweden, like a living silicon tribute to innovations yet to come. "Many cities in Sweden have a square or street that bears Berzelius's name, but the average person probably doesn't know much about him," said Niclas Andersson, technical director at the National Supercomputer Centre (NSC) at Linköping University, which is home to the system based on the NVIDIA DGX SuperPOD.

Marcus Wallenberg, the billionaire heir of Sweden's foremost industrial dynasty, first got introduced to the topic of artificial intelligence back in 1977, when he studied in Palo Alto. "I walked around on the Stanford campus and saw a big sign where it said'SAIL' and since I love to sail, I went up and took a better look at it. Underneath it, it said, Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory." Today, his family has become one of the foremost investors of artificial intelligence in Europe, investing around €300m in its AI program called WASP, in a mixture of AI startups and a business transformation company called Combient, bringing together Nordic companies to work together on AI. Marcus is also the chairman of Saab and the Swedish bank SEB, which the Wallenbergs founded in 1856 and is key to the family's success.