EU awards French Atos unit Bull contract to build AI supercomputer, its largest ever order

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The European Union on Tuesday awarded French state-owned computer company Bull a contract worth 387.78 million euros ($449.4 million) to build an artificial intelligence supercomputer. This is Bull's largest order ever and part of the EU's efforts to expand computing capacity and narrow the gap with the United States and China. The contract comes months after the French government spun off Bull from debt-laden Atos. According to officials at the European High Performance Computing Joint Undertaking (EuroHPC), demand for AI computing resources exceeds available capacity. EuroHPC selected Bull as the sixth system ordered under its AI Factory program. The new system, named LUMI-AI, will be co-located with the existing supercomputer LUMI in Finland and is expected to become operational in the second half of 2027. This order further expands the network that EuroHPC has been building for years. With a total budget of 8.2 billion euros through 2027, EuroHPC has established 19 AI factories centered on 12 supercomputers, with plans for further expansion. Evangelos Floros, head of infrastructure at EuroHPC, told reporters, "At present, we cannot meet all demand and have to turn down some applications." He expressed hope that the capacity shortfall would be alleviated as additional systems come online in the second half of this year and beyond. Floros noted that EuroHPC's network has become a key foundation for AI development in Europe, with AI factories adding systems specialized for AI training and applications. Bull will use AI chips from AMD, a major competitor to U.S. chip giant Nvidia, and integrate storage technology from IBM and network technology from Nokia. EuroHPC systems are already being used by European AI developers. French cloud services company OVHcloud told Reuters it has completed initial training of a foundation model using Jupiter, a supercomputer EuroHPC is building in Germany. In addition, Italian startup Domino, which leads the EU-backed EUROPA consortium, is also using EuroHPC infrastructure to train its own models.

Impact on stocks 5

Artificial Intelligence▲ · 4 stocks
Nokia Corporation
NOA3
▲ PositiveDemandrelevance

Bull will integrate Nokia network technology into the LUMI-AI system.

Cloud & Digital Infrastructure▲ · 1 stocks

Theme Impact 2

Off-coverage companies 2

BullPrivate▲ Positive
Demandrelevance

Bull won its largest-ever order, a 387.78 million euro EU contract to build an AI supercomputer.

DomynPrivate± Mixed
relevance

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