How Norway’s $2 Trillion Fund Uses AI

Interview with NBIM’s Stian Kirkeberg.

INTERVIEW

Norway’s sovereign wealth fund runs the biggest pool of capital in the world.

Stian Kirkeberg is tasked with implementing Tangen’s vision across roughly $2 trillion in assets and about 8,600 companies as NBIM’s Head of AI and ML.

That scale brings a specific set of constraints: broad market coverage, strict ethical rules, and an organization that has to work reliably across thousands of decisions. An individual can quickly boost their own output with vibe-coded solutions, but that does not necessarily translate into a faster organization. When everyone becomes a coder, productivity can rise in pockets while technical debt quietly accumulates.

In this interview, Kirkeberg walks through how NBIM is navigating this transition. He explains their partnership with Anthropic, the move from a bottom-up ambassador model to a more centralized strategy, and how small autonomous teams are replacing traditional Scrum structures. He also gets specific about how they reserve GPU capacity from hyperscalers and how LLMs are being used to screen thousands of companies for ESG compliance.

By reading this conversation, you will understand the constraints that show up when AI-driven development scales, and why the biggest hurdle to ROI is not the model’s performance, but the organization’s ability to absorb what it produces.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.