Oct 23 (Reuters) - The European Union lags far behind

the United States and China in investing in artificial

intelligence, the CEO of AI chipmaker Nvidia ( NVDA ) said on

Wednesday.

While there are only a handful of artificial intelligence

companies in Europe, such as France's Mistral and Germany's

Aleph Alpha, the bloc passed the world's first comprehensive

rules to govern AI which came into force in August.

"The EU has to accelerate the progress in AI," Nvidia ( NVDA ) CEO

Jensen Huang said during a visit to Copenhagen. "There's an

awakening in every country realising that the data is a national

resource."

Huang was in Denmark to launch a new supercomputer named

Gefion, which boasts 1,528 graphic processing units (GPUs) and

was built by Nvidia ( NVDA ) in partnership with the Novo Nordisk

Foundation and Denmark's Export and Investment Fund.

Nvidia ( NVDA ) is the world's top maker of GPUs, which are in high

demand because they can be used to speed up artificial

intelligence work. OpenAI's ChatGPT, for example, was created

with thousands of Nvidia GPUs.

Denmark plans to use the supercomputer for drug discovery,

disease diagnosis, treatment and complicated life science

challenges.

"The era of computer aided drug discovery must be within

this decade," Huang said. "This will be the decade of digital

biology."

Nvidia ( NVDA ) is the second largest listed U.S. company after Apple

with a market value of $3.52 trillion.