The EuroHPC Joint Undertaking, Europe's joint venture for building high-performance computers, has awarded a contract for a new system. Lumi-AI is to be built in Kajaani, Finland, serving not just research but also, as the sixth AI Factory, industrial AI applications.
Bull wins the contract, AMD supplies the technology
The contract went to the French company Bull, which the French state took over in 2026. Bull has a long tradition of building high-performance computers and has already received the contracts to build Jupiter and Alice Recoque. As with the latter, Lumi-AI will use AMD's current generation of Epyc processors and accelerators, specifically Epyc 9006 chips with 256 Zen6c cores. The accelerators will be MI430X units, which AMD designs to be less AI-focused, since Lumi-AI is also meant to excel at classic scientific applications. Bull is using its own XH3500 platform for the build. The system will run exclusively on electricity from renewable sources, and its waste heat will feed into Kajaani's district heating network.
Just below the exascale mark
Lumi-AI will likely stay just below the exascale mark. According to the press release, the system is meant to nearly double the FP64 floating-point performance of its predecessor. Lumi, which currently ranks 11th on the Top500 list of the world's most powerful supercomputers, reaches a theoretical FP64 performance of 531.51 petaflops, and hits 379.7 PFlops in the High Performance Linpack benchmark. At around 388 million euros for construction and operation, Lumi-AI is also cheaper than Jupiter and Alice Recoque, which had 500 million and 554 million euros available respectively. Whether Lumi-AI can secure a spot among the ten most powerful measured systems worldwide remains to be seen, especially with many new high-performance computers currently planned in the US. The supercomputer is expected to go into operation in the second half of 2027 and could therefore debut in the November edition of the Top500 list.
A quantum computer on top
Alongside the classic cluster computer, a quantum computer will also be installed as part of the new Lumi system. It runs under the name Lumi-IQ, built by the Finnish company IQM, and is meant to be usable as a hybrid system together with Lumi-AI. Also involved in the project is the once-global Finnish company Nokia, which is set to supply part of the network equipment, while the storage system comes from IBM.