Bull, the state-owned French maker of Europe's fastest supercomputers, has reopened an expanded factory in Angers that doubles its production capacity, executives told Reuters, as Europe moves to bolster its AI computing power.

The expansion comes as the European Union commits €7 billion ($7.87 billion) between 2021 and 2027 to a network of supercomputers intended to narrow the computing gap with the United States and China. Bull's plant in Angers is the only factory in Europe dedicated to building these machines, and its expansion is designed to support that goal. The projects relying on Bull's systems span publicly funded research infrastructure, industrial simulation and AI model development, reflecting the range of uses behind Europe's push to expand computing capacity.

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 supercomputer network with member states. Bull competed for those contracts against companies including Hewlett Packard Enterprise.

Among recent deals, Airbus inaugurated Bull-built supercomputers in Toulouse and Hamburg this year under a five-year agreement that media reports valued at close to €100 million and that tripled the planemaker's simulation capacity. Bull told Reuters the reported value was not correct but declined to disclose the actual figure.

Separately, cloud operator OVHcloud and Domyn, a company backed by the European Commission, 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 lift production to 24 next year on demand that executives expect 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. Executives said the two orders could not have been built alongside each other before the expansion.

Strategic Origins

France completed its purchase of Bull from debt-laden IT group Atos on March 31, in a transaction valuing the company at up to €404 million. Le Roux said the original motive was strategic: 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 used to simulate nuclear tests.

Bull built JUPITER, Europe's first exascale machine — the fastest class of supercomputers — now running at the Juelich center in Germany. The Alice Recoque system, 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 the European Union.

European Supply Chain

The Angers factory assembles systems using Nvidia, AMD and Intel processors, or European parts, depending on customer requirements. 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 will also manufacture Nvidia's NVL systems at a plant in the Czech Republic, with final assembly taking place at the Angers factory.

($1 = 0.8894 euros) — Reuters