Europe expands AI computing network with €390 million order from France's Bull

By Leo Marchandon

Aug 31 (Reuters) - 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 for up to €404 million.

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.

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.

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 chips, the main competitor to Nvidia, with storage by IBM and networking by Nokia.

European supercomputers' AI capabilities are already being put to test. OVHcloud, the continent's largest cloud player, previously told Reuters it had completed initial training of a foundation model on Jupiter, while Domyn, the Italian startup leading the Commission-backed EUROPA consortium, has secured access to EuroHPC systems to train its own AI model with a target of 400 billion parameters.

Neither company has revealed a model or specs yet, even as they attempt to build themselves up as European frontier contenders alongside Paris-based Mistral.

($1 = 0.8630 euros)

(Reporting by Leo Marchandon in Gdansk, editing by Milla Nissi-Prussak)