The European Union has announced which will invest 750 million euros in its so-called “seven EuroHPC AI factories”. The selection of these seven supercomputing centers includes the National Supercomputing Center (BSC-CNS) of Barcelona as the first protagonist, with MareNostrum 5 as one of the jewels in the crown. Will they be enough to compete in this field?
Europe wants to be the “AI continent”. Henna Virkkunen, new head of the technology area in the European Union, recently coined the term “AI continent”. The objective is to turn Europe into a powerhouse that attracts the best talent to develop this field. Investment in supercomputing centers is an integral part of that strategy.
“Factories” to train European models. The investment will help European startups and companies to have access, according to the European Commission“to train advanced AI models and develop AI solutions.” The seven selected centers are:
- Barcelona (Spain): “BSCAIF” at the BSC in Barcelona
- Bologna (Italy): IT4LIAat CINECA – Bologna Tecnopolo
- Kajaani (Finland): «FIALUMI» at CSC
- Bissen (Luxembourg): “Meluxina-AI” on LuxProvide
- Linköping (Sweden): “MIMER” at Linköping University
- Stuttgart (Germany): “HammerHAI” at the University of Stuttgart
- Athens (Greece): “Pharos” on GRNET
200 million for the BSC and MareNostrum. As reveals the Barcelona Supercomputing Center, of the funds that the European Union will provide, 198 million euros will go to the BSC and MareNostrum 5, which will make it “an epicenter of AI development.” Of these, 62 million will come from the Minister of Digital Transformation, and 14 million euros will come from the Government of Catalonia. There will also be contributions from other countries: Portugal will invest 15.6 million, Türkiye 6.5 and Romania one million euros. These total contributions will be practically doubled by the European Commission under the Horizon Europe funding program, which will contribute an additional €98 million.
One more super supercomputer. The BSC’s proposal for those funds includes an expansion of its supercomputing capacity with an upgrade of MareNostrum 5, which will be equipped “with advanced AI accelerator technology for the training and development of large generative models (LLM).” The deployment of the project will occur in 2025 and will be fully operational, they assure this organization, before the end of that year.
Competing will be difficult… The implementation of this plan is striking. It occurs, for example, months after Mistral, one of the most promising AI startups in Europe, signed an agreement with Microsoft to use its infrastructure to train its models.
…and above all, expensive. The European Union wants to try to compete, although the colossal cost of keeping up may be a major obstacle to European aspirations. The problem is that in just one or two years the hardware is renewed – this has happened with the jump from the H100 to the B200 from NVIDIA – and updating is very, very expensive.
Supercomputers against data centers. AI giants like Microsoft, OpenAI, Meta, or xAI are investing billions of dollars in new data centers aimed at offering these AI services. The European asset allows it to compete with top-level supercomputers such as LUMI (Finland), CINECA (Italy) and Mare Nostrum 5 (Spain), currently the world’s numbers 8, 9 and 11 in terms of potential. TOP500.org list, respectively.
In techopiniones | MareNostrum 5 is already underway: Spain’s great leap to be in the first world supercomputing league