Bull wins €387.8 million contract for European AI supercomputer

Europe is expanding its publicly funded AI supercomputing network with a €387.8 million ($449.4 million) system from French state-owned Bull, aiming to address a computing deficit with the US and China. Bull described the deal as its largest contract ever, months after the French state carved the business out of debt-laden Atos for up to €404 million.

EuroHPC selected Bull to build LUMI-AI, the sixth machine ordered under its AI Factories programme. The supercomputer will be installed alongside the existing LUMI machine at Finland’s supercomputing centre and is expected to come online in the second half of 2027. Funding will be split equally between EuroHPC and the LUMI AI Factory consortium, which includes Finland, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Norway and Poland.

EuroHPC’s broader network is backed by a budget of €8.2 billion for 2021-2027 and includes 19 AI factory centres built around 12 supercomputers, with plans to secure up to seven additional sites. LUMI-AI will support large-scale AI training and inference as well as scientific simulations, using AMD chips, IBM storage and Nokia networking.

European systems are already being used for AI development. OVHcloud has completed initial training of a foundation model on Jupiter, while Domyn has secured EuroHPC access to train a model with a target of 400 billion parameters, though neither company has disclosed model details or specifications.