The European High Performance Computing Joint Undertaking signed a €387.8 million contract with the French systems maker Bull to build LUMI-AI, a supercomputer that will run on AMD chips and roughly quintuple the AI processing power currently available to European researchers and companies through the existing LUMI system.
The contract, announced Monday, covers acquisition, delivery, installation and multi-year maintenance of the new machine, with costs split evenly between EuroHPC JU and the six-country LUMI AI Factory consortium of Finland, Czechia, Denmark, Estonia, Norway and Poland. The system will be built on Bull's liquid-cooled BullSequana XH3500 architecture and powered by AMD Instinct MI430X GPUs paired with sixth-generation AMD Epyc processors carrying 256 cores each.
Ten times the AI capacity
EuroHPC says LUMI-AI will deliver roughly ten times the AI computing capacity of the current LUMI supercomputer and nearly double its general-purpose high-performance computing capability once deployed. IBM is supplying the storage layer through IBM Storage Scale, while Nokia is contributing data-center networking alongside Bull's own BXI interconnect — described as Europe's only high-bandwidth, low-latency interconnect purpose-built for AI and HPC workloads. The machine will be installed at CSC's new data center in the Renforsin Ranta business park in Kajaani, Finland, with deployment targeted for the second half of 2027.
"Together, these systems will form a powerful European AI infrastructure ecosystem, enabling SMEs and startups to access world-class supercomputing resources," EuroHPC JU executive director Anders Jensen said in a statement announcing the deal. Bull chief executive Emmanuel Le Roux called the award confirmation of "the strength of Bull's technological leadership and latest innovations."
Part of a wider sovereignty push
The project is the latest and largest piece of the European Union's effort to build homegrown AI compute capacity rather than rely primarily on U.S. hyperscalers and chipmakers, a priority that has intensified as European governments push for greater "digital sovereignty" in AI infrastructure. The AMD chip selection is notable in that context: Nvidia has dominated AI accelerator sales globally, and a flagship European system built instead on AMD Instinct hardware signals both a diversification bet by EuroHPC and a validation of AMD's push to compete for large sovereign AI contracts.
The facility is also designed to run on renewable energy and to funnel its waste heat into Kajaani's district heating network, and it will sit alongside LUMI-IQ, a quantum computing platform built by Finnish firm IQM Quantum Computers that EuroHPC plans to integrate with the new AI system.
With deployment more than a year out, the immediate significance of Monday's announcement is financial and strategic rather than operational: it locks in one of the largest single AI infrastructure procurements in European history and gives Bull and AMD a marquee reference project as both companies compete for a larger share of the sovereign AI computing market taking shape across the EU.
