The European Union is stepping up efforts to close the gap with the US and China in artificial intelligence computing power. The EuroHPC JU (European High Performance Computing Joint Undertaking) plans to launch a new supercomputer.
The European Union is stepping up efforts to close the gap with the US and China in artificial intelligence computing power. The EuroHPC JU (European High Performance Computing Joint Undertaking) plans to launch a new supercomputer.
The new system will be created French state-owned company Bull for $449.4 million, Reuters reports .
This is the largest contract in Bull's history. The order comes just months after the French state bought the business out of Atos' debt structure for up to €404 million.
The new supercomputer, LUMI-AI, will be installed at the Finnish Supercomputing Center alongside the existing LUMI system. It is scheduled to be launched in the second half of 2027.
The costs will be equally divided between EuroHPC and the LUMI AI Factory consortium, which includes Finland, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Norway and Poland.
To ensure high performance in AI training and inference, as well as complex scientific simulations, Bull will use AMD chips, IBM storage systems, and Nokia networking equipment.
LUMI-AI will be the sixth supercomputer commissioned under the AI Factories programme. The total budget of the EuroHPC joint initiative for 2021-2027 is €8.2 billion. The network currently includes 19 centres and 12 supercomputers, including the German Jupiter system, and plans to expand to seven more sites.
Europe's computing resources are already being actively tested by local developers. The continent's largest cloud operator OVHcloud has conducted initial training of a basic AI model on the Jupiter supercomputer, while Italian startup Domyn is preparing to train its own model on 400 billion parameters, aiming to compete with the world's leading laboratories, along with Paris's Mistral.
