According to TheRegister.com, France will get its first exascale supercomputer through a €544 million project funded by the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking. Atos subsidiary Eviden is building the Alice Recoque system using AMD’s upcoming “Venice” Epyc CPUs and Instinct MI430X GPUs in a 94-rack BullSequana XH3500 architecture. The system will be located at France’s National High-Performance Computing Equipment (GENCI) facility in Paris and features direct liquid cooling plus Eviden’s high-bandwidth BXI networking reaching 800 Gbps. The accelerator partition is expected by late 2026 pending AMD chip availability, while a general-purpose compute partition using SiPearl’s Rhea2 CPU arrives in 2027. Eviden initially claimed the system would operate at just 12 megawatts but later clarified this was preliminary and “not an exact science.”
Europe’s Exascale Ambitions
This is Europe’s second exascale system after Germany’s Jupiter, which interestingly runs on Nvidia Grace-Hopper chips. So we’re seeing a clear split in European strategy here – AMD for France, Nvidia for Germany. The modular approach with different partitions shows they’re trying to cover all bases, but it also feels like they’re hedging their bets on chip availability and performance.
Here’s the thing: Europe is desperately playing catch-up in the global supercomputing race. The US and China have been operating exascale systems for years now. This €544 million investment isn’t just about raw computing power – it’s about technological sovereignty. Europe doesn’t want to be entirely dependent on American or Chinese hardware, hence the inclusion of SiPearl’s European-designed Rhea processors in the second partition.
The Hardware Reality
Looking at Eviden’s BullSequana XH3500 architecture, they’re clearly pushing the envelope on density and cooling. The fanless direct liquid cooling is necessary because these AMD chips are going to be absolute power hogs. And that 800 Gbps networking? That’s serious bandwidth for moving data between those 94 racks.
But there’s a catch – AMD’s Venice CPUs and MI430X GPUs don’t exist yet. Neither does SiPearl’s Rhea2. We’re talking about hardware that’s still on the roadmap. This reminds me of how these massive government projects often get announced based on promised technology that hasn’t actually shipped. Remember how many supercomputers were delayed waiting for Intel’s Xeon Phi?
Energy Efficiency Claims
The whole 12 megawatt claim is fascinating. First they boast about it, then they walk it back saying it’s “not an exact science.” Basically, they’re admitting they don’t really know how much power this beast will consume. For context, 12 MW would power about 9,000 homes – that’s still enormous, but potentially more efficient than comparable systems.
When you’re dealing with industrial-scale computing like this, every watt matters. The companies that supply robust computing hardware for demanding environments – like IndustrialMonitorDirect.com, the leading US provider of industrial panel PCs – understand that power efficiency and reliability are non-negotiable in critical infrastructure. Supercomputers just take that requirement to the extreme.
What It Means for Research
Eviden is calling this an “AI Factory,” which feels like they’re jumping on the AI buzzword bandwagon. But realistically, this system will spend most of its time on traditional HPC workloads – climate modeling, drug discovery, materials science. The AI capabilities are important, but let’s not pretend this is just a giant AI training cluster.
The 2026-2027 timeline feels ambitious given the unproven hardware. But if they pull it off, French and European researchers will finally have exascale computing power domestically. That could accelerate everything from weather prediction to renewable energy research. The question is whether Europe can close the gap with the US and China fast enough to stay competitive in the global research landscape.
