Key facts
- Bull doubled its supercomputer production capacity with a factory expansion in Angers, France.
- The expansion cost €80 million, increasing output from six to 12 racks per month.
- Bull has won 15 of 18 tenders issued by EuroHPC, the EU body for supercomputers.
- France purchased Bull from Atos on March 31 for up to €404 million.
- European-made components now account for 70% of the machines being built by Bull.
Bull, the state-owned French maker of supercomputers, has doubled its production capacity with an expanded factory in Angers, France, to support Europe's growing AI computing needs. The expansion, costing €80 million, increases output from six to 12 racks per month, with potential to reach 24 next year.
The European Union has committed €7 billion ($7.87 billion) between 2021 and 2027 to a network of supercomputers, aiming to reduce the compute gap with the United States and China. Bull's Angers plant is the only factory in Europe dedicated to building these machines.
Bull's Chief Executive Emmanuel Le Roux stated that the company has received more orders this year than ever before and has secured 15 out of 18 tenders from EuroHPC, the EU body that co-funds supercomputers with member states. Competitors include Hewlett Packard Enterprise.
Airbus recently inaugurated Bull-built supercomputers in Toulouse and Hamburg as part of a five-year deal worth close to €100 million, which tripled the planemaker's simulation capacity. Cloud operator OVHcloud and European Commission-backed Domyn are using Bull's JUPITER supercomputer, Europe's first exascale machine, to train frontier-class AI models.
France completed its purchase of Bull from the debt-laden IT group Atos on March 31 for up to €404 million, driven by strategic motives. Historically, Bull was tasked with building machines for France's nuclear agency to simulate tests after the US stopped supplying supercomputers in the 1980s.
Bull is assembling systems using processors from Nvidia, AMD, and Intel, as well as European parts, with European components now making up 70% of the machines, an increase from 20%-30% five years ago. Under a June partnership, Bull and Taiwan's Foxconn will also manufacture Nvidia's NVL systems in the Czech Republic, with final assembly occurring at the Angers factory.