Europe expands AI computing network with €390 million order from France's Bull
AMD•EuroHPC orders LUMI-AI from Bull
Europe is expanding its network of publicly funded AI supercomputers with a €387.8 million ($449.4 million) system from French state-owned Bull, as part of a push to close a computing deficit with the U.S. and China.
This is Bull's largest contract ever, the company told Reuters on Monday, just months after the French state carved the business out of debt-laden Atos ATOS.PA for up to €404 million.
LUMI-AI to be installed in Finland
The European Union's supercomputing body EuroHPC selected Bull to build LUMI-AI, the sixth machine ordered under its AI Factories programme. The system is a new supercomputer to be installed alongside the existing LUMI machine at Finland's supercomputing centre. It is expected to come online in the second half of 2027.
Funding is split equally between EuroHPC and the LUMI AI Factory consortium, consisting of Finland, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Norway and Poland.
EuroHPC expands its wider AI network
The order adds to a network EuroHPC has spent years building. The joint undertaking, backed by a budget of €8.2 billion for 2021-2027, has procured an infrastructure network of 19 AI factory centres, built around 12 supercomputers including Germany's Jupiter, and is now moving to secure up to seven additional sites.
Hardware suppliers and European AI users
Bull will build the system to run AI training and inference at large scale, alongside heavy-duty scientific simulations. Computing power will be supplied by AMD AMD.O chips, the main competitor to Nvidia , with storage by IBM and networking by Nokia .
