Europe orders €388M AI supercomputer from state-owned Bull to close computing gap with US and China

EuroHPC Awards Bull Its Largest Contract Ever

EuroHPC, the European Union's supercomputing body, has selected French state-owned Bull to build LUMI-AI, awarding the company its largest contract ever at €387.8 million ($449.4 million)1

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. This marks the sixth machine ordered under EuroHPC's AI Factories programme as Europe expands its AI computing network to close the computing gap with the US and China3

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. The order comes just five months after the French state carved Bull out of debt-laden Atos for up to €404 million in March2

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, making the French government the company's sole shareholder.

Six-Country Consortium Funds Finland Deployment

Funding for the AI supercomputer is split equally between EuroHPC and the LUMI AI Factory consortium, consisting of Finland, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Norway and Poland1

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. LUMI-AI will be installed alongside the existing LUMI machine at Finland's supercomputing centre in Kajaani and is expected to come online in the second half of 20272

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. The new system is expected to deliver roughly ten times the AI capacity of the existing LUMI supercomputer while nearly doubling its conventional high-performance computing capability2

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AMD Chips Power European AI Infrastructure

Bull will build the system to run large-scale AI training and inference alongside heavy-duty scientific simulations3

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. LUMI-AI will use AMD Instinct MI430X accelerators and sixth-generation EPYC processors with 256 cores, built around Bull's BullSequana XH3500 architecture2

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. Computing power will be supplied by AMD chips, the main competitor to Nvidia, with storage by IBM and networking by Nokia4

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. Bull is also supplying its BXI interconnect and patented warm-water direct liquid cooling technology, both developed in France2

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EuroHPC Builds Network of 19 AI Factory Centres

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 AI 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 sites1

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. EuroHPC selected its first seven AI Factories sites in December 2024, followed by six more in October 2025, with procurement contracts signed progressively since then2

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European Companies Test Foundation Models on Supercomputers

European supercomputers' AI capabilities are already being tested. OVHcloud, the continent's largest cloud player, previously told Reuters it had completed initial training of a foundation model on Jupiter3

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. Meanwhile, 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 parameters4

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. Neither company has revealed a model or specs yet as they attempt to build themselves up as European frontier contenders alongside Paris-based Mistral1

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. Bull operates Europe's only supercomputer manufacturing plant in Angers and builds systems used to model France's nuclear deterrent, giving the business strategic importance beyond commercial supercomputing2

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