Europe’s fastest supercomputer, Germany’s Jupiter – which is also now the fourth fastest supercomputer in the world – is being inaugurated on Friday at the Jülich research centre.
“Traditional” supercomputers are typically used for complex simulations, such as forecasting extreme weather or nuclear explosions. But Jupiter also boasts a large component set that’s intended for training AI models, meaning it plays in the same performance league as many of Big Tech’s top AI hubs.
Jupiter is set to be the most powerful of the EU’s so-called AI factories: compute hubs equipped with specialised AI hardware which the Commission wants to provide European companies with access to specialised computing resources that they need to grow the EU’s AI ecosystem.
“Jupiter strengthens Europe’s digital sovereignty, accelerates discovery, and ensures that the most powerful and sustainable computing resources are available to our researchers, innovators, and industries,” said Ekaterina Zaharieva, the EU’s innovation commissioner, in a statement welcoming Jupiter’s official launch.
The ribbon-cutting is a big moment in Germany, too. German chancellor Friedrich Merz, along with the country’s science minister Dorothee Bär and digital minister Karsten Wildberger, are set to attend the inauguration.
While Jupiter remains top of the EU’s supercomputer league, France plans to complete a second European supercomputer with the same level of performance as Jupiter next year. The machine, to be called Alice Recoque, will also be connected to an AI Factory.
Several other AI Factory projects are still ongoing around the bloc. The Commission had originally promised that all these facilities would be fully operational by the end of 2025 – but that timeline is looking increasingly tight as the year closes in.
In parallel, the Commission is considering pitches for a separate slate of AI gigafactories, which are meant to be several times more powerful for AI training than Jupiter.
(nl)
