(Reuters) - The European Union lags far behind the United States and China in investing in artificial intelligence, the CEO of AI chipmaker Nvidia 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 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 in partnership with the Novo Nordisk Foundation and Denmark's Export and Investment Fund.

Nvidia 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 is the second largest listed U.S. company after Apple with a market value of $3.52 trillion.

(Reporting by Jacob Gronholt-Pedersen in Copenhagen and Supantha Mukherjee in Stockholm; Editing by Kirsten Donovan)