NVIDIA's GTC was overwhelming in the best way. The scale of investment in GPU infrastructure and data centers is staggering. Every conversation circled back to compute — who has it, who needs more, and where it's going to be built.
Norway keeps coming to mind. We have cheap, abundant renewable energy. We have cold climates that reduce cooling costs. We have political stability and strong digital infrastructure. The ingredients for becoming a major hub for AI compute are already there. The question is whether we move fast enough. I met founders at GTC who are already working on this — bringing AI compute solutions to the Nordics. It felt like one of those rare moments where timing and geography actually align in our favor.
If 2025 was the year everyone talked about AI assistants, 2026 is the year agents became the default framing. OpenAI's shift changed the conversation. At GTC, NVIDIA launched their own agent platform. In every pitch I heard and every demo I gave, the question wasn't "does your product use AI?" — it was "how autonomous is it?"
For anyone building product right now, this is the new baseline. Users expect software to do things for them, not just help them do things. The bar moved, fast. As a founder, it's both exciting and humbling — you have to keep rebuilding your assumptions about what "good" looks like.
Coming from Europe, I expected American founders and investors to be more dismissive about security and privacy. They weren't. People are genuinely thinking about it. But the tone was different from what I'm used to at home.
In the Nordics, privacy conversations can feel existential — regulatory, philosophical, cautious. Here, the framing was more practical: these are known, scoped problems with engineering solutions. Data governance, access controls, audit trails. Not unsolved mysteries, just hard work that needs doing. There was a surprising optimism to it. Not naivety — just a bias toward building the guardrails rather than debating whether to enter the building.
The Valley still moves at a speed that's hard to internalize until you're in it. But what struck me most this trip wasn't the technology — it was the conviction. People here believe deeply that what they're building matters, and they act accordingly. That energy is contagious, and honestly, it's the thing I most want to bring back to Oslo.
We have the talent, the energy infrastructure, and increasingly the ambition. The gap isn't capability — it's pace.
