Scaleway to build AMD-powered AI supercomputer in Sweden

By Leo Marchandon

Oct 13 (Reuters) - Scaleway will build an AI supercomputer in Sweden, its first outside France, running on AI chips from AMD, the French cloud company said on Tuesday during its annual AI conference in Paris.

Scaleway said the machine would be the first AMD-based AI supercomputer for commercial use in Europe, open to startups, AI companies and businesses across the continent. The system will run on AMD Instinct MI355X, the chipmaker's answer to Nvidia's Blackwell line which powers most AI computing globally.

AMD chips already power supercomputers used for European research, including LUMI in Finland. US cloud firms including Oracle and Vultr also rent AMD chips to European customers.

"Scaleway is expanding the choice of AI infrastructure available to customers across Europe, through AMD Instinct GPUs and our open ROCm software ecosystem," said Stephanie Dismore, AMD's senior vice president for EMEA.

AI developers use specific software ecosystems to code. AMD's ROCm is open-source and runs the widely used AI programming tools that also work on Nvidia chips, while rival Nvidia's equivalent, CUDA, is proprietary and runs only on Nvidia chips, locking developed applications to the hardware.

Scaleway said it picked Sweden as a location due to its largely low-carbon electricity and its AI sector. It entered the Swedish market in May, when it signed a deal with telecom operator Tele2 to sell its cloud and AI services there.

Tele2's business-to-business head Stefan Trampus said the supercomputer "sends a clear signal" on Sweden's attractiveness for AI infrastructure. 

The machine will be assembled and maintained by French firm Bull, with servers from Giga Computing, networking from HPE, storage from VAST Data and cooling liquid from Motul.

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