Exclusive-French supercomputer maker Bull doubles output to boost Europe's AI ambitions

By Leo Marchandon

Oct 1 (Reuters) - Bull, the ‌state-owned French maker of ​Europe's fastest ​supercomputers, reopened an expanded factory on Thursday to double its production capacity, executives told Reuters, as Europe bolsters its AI computing capacity.

The European Union has committed €7 billion ($7.87 billion) over 2021-2027 to a network ‌of supercomputers, aiming to close a compute gap with the United States and China. Bull's ⁠plant in Angers, France, is the only factory in Europe dedicated to building these machines, and its expansion is meant to support ‌that goal.

Chief Executive Emmanuel Le Roux ‌said Bull has received more orders this year than ever before, and has won 15 of the 18 tenders issued by EuroHPC, the EU body that co-funds Europe's network of supercomputers with member states, competing against ​companies including Hewlett Packard Enterprise. Airbus inaugurated Bull-built supercomputers in Toulouse and Hamburg this year, in a five-year deal worth close to €100 million that tripled the planemaker's simulation capacity.

Cloud operator OVHcloud and European Commission-backed ⁠Domyn are both attempting to train frontier-class AI models on Bull's JUPITER supercomputer alongside other companies Bull declined to name.

OUTPUT COULD EXPAND AGAIN IN 2027

The Angers ​expansion cost €80 million, Bull executives said. Output has already doubled, from six racks a month previously to 12 now, and the plant can boost output to 24 next ​year on demand it expects to keep growing.

France's order from ‌Bull, a supercomputer named after computer scientist Alice Recoque, accounts for 94 racks, and is being assembled in parallel with LUMI-AI, Finland's €388 million system and Bull's biggest-ever contract. The ⁠two orders could not have been built alongside each other before the expansion, executives said.

France completed its purchase of Bull from debt-laden IT group Atos on March 31, valuing the company at up to €404 million. The original motive was strategic, Le Roux ⁠said. In the 1980s, after the United States stopped shipping supercomputers to the CEA, France's nuclear agency, France turned to ​Bull to build the machines that were used to simulate nuclear tests.

Bull built JUPITER, Europe's first exascale machine, the fastest class of supercomputers, now running at the Juelich centre in Germany. Alice Recoque, ordered for the CEA, is due for delivery in stages ‌from the end of this year, at a cost of €554 million to the French government and European Union.

The Angers factory assembles systems using Nvidia, AMD and Intel ‌processors, or European parts, depending on customer demands. European-made components account for 70% of the machines being built, up from 20% ⁠to 30% five years ago.

Under a partnership ‌signed in June, Bull and Taiwan's Foxconn <2317. ​TW> will also manufacture Nvidia's NVL systems at a plant in the Czech Republic, with final assembly in the Angers factory.

($1 = 0.8894 euros)

(Reporting by Leo Marchandon; editing by Kenneth Li and ‌Rod Nickel)

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