By Gianluca Lo Nostro
(Reuters) -Eviden, a division of French IT group Atos, said on Tuesday it had won a contract together with U.S. chipmaker Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) to build a new supercomputer
in Europe, as the region moves to close the technology gap with the U.S.
The machine, named after French computer scientist Alice Recoque, will be installed in France, with construction expected to start by the end of 2026.
It will be the second exascale supercomputer in Europe, after Jupiter in Germany, with a total cost estimated at 554 million euros ($642.5 million) over five years, Eviden said.
Supercomputers are vastly more powerful than traditional ones, and are considered exascale when their peak performance exceeds one exaflop, a metric used to measure computing power.
Eviden said the Alice Recoque, which can surpass one quintillion calculations per second, has computing power equalling that of 10 million personal computers connected together.
The global tech industry is scaling up computing and energy investments to meet the demands of artificial intelligence.
While U.S. tech giants have dominated this space, Europe is expanding its computing capacity through initiatives like EuroHPC JU, which pools resources from EU member states.
The new supercomputer project is led by France’s high-performance computing agency GENCI and operated by state research organization CEA. Funding will be provided by EuroHPC and by the Jules Verne consortium.
Philippe Lavocat, CEO of GENCI, told Reuters that sovereignty was a main request from EuroHPC and the French government.
The computer will be used to advance AI models, climate change modelling and medical research, he said.
Eviden will incorporate AMD's MI430X chips, part of the MI400 family, and the same generation of graphics processing unit slated for use by ChatGPT-maker OpenAI.
About 70% of the machine's components will be produced in Europe, compared with about half for Jupiter.
"We are embedding a new networking technology that replaces Nvidia networking used in Jupiter," said Emmanuel Le Roux, Eviden's head of advanced computing and AI.
($1 = 0.8622 euros)
(Reporting by Gianluca Lo Nostro and Leo Marchandon in Gdansk; Editing by Milla Nissi-Prussak)
