Europe is getting its second exascale supercomputer. Eviden and AMD have been officially selected to build Alice Recoque. This system will perform well above the one exaflop threshold and accelerate both HPC research and large-scale AI applications in Europe.
The installation will be the most powerful system ever deployed in France and will support the next generation of European research and AI infrastructure.
The system will be built for the French GENCI and will be located in the CEA’s TGCC data center, where several BullSequana systems are already in operation. Alice Recoque is expected to deliver a 50-fold increase in computing power compared to current facilities, while increasing energy consumption by only about 5 times. The total project cost is €554 million and will be jointly funded by EuroHPC JU, the Digital Europe Programme, and the Jules Verne consortium, in which France, the Netherlands, and Greece are collaborating.
Alice Recoque will combine classic HPC simulations with modern AI workloads. To this end, AMD’s yet-to-be-launched EPYC Venice processors will be used, which, according to external sources, could feature up to 256 cores per CPU. The acceleration comes from AMD’s Instinct MI430X, based on the CDNA 5 architecture and equipped with 432 GB HBM4 and a bandwidth of 19.6 TB per second.
The GPUs support both HPC precision and AI formats such as FP4 and FP8. AMD FPGAs are added for workloads that benefit from customizable logic. For users who explicitly want to run on European technology, a separate computing party is also being set up with SiPearl’s upcoming Rhea2 CPU. That chip is not yet complete, so those components will likely be placed later in the implementation cycle.
Hot water cooling
The system consists of 94 racks. The whole is built on Evidens’ latest BullSequana XH3500 architecture. The interconnect is provided entirely by Evidens’ own BXI technology. With this, the supplier wants to offer an alternative to non-European HPC networks while retaining control over the entire architecture. Storage is provided by DDN.
The system consumes approximately 12 megawatts during typical loads. The entire installation is cooled with hot water, with all components cooled by Evidens’ fifth-generation liquid cooling. Software such as Evidens’ Argos is designed to enable real-time energy management, with improvements that, according to the supplier, can deliver up to approximately 20 percent higher energy efficiency per workload.
Alice Recoque is intended for a wide range of scientific domains. These include climate modeling, materials research, energy sciences, and medical digital twins. This is in addition to the development of European AI models. The system must also offer sufficient capacity to process the ever-increasing data streams from telescopes, satellites, and IoT systems.
Eviden and AMD’s planning takes into account the market introduction of the Venice CPUs and MI430X accelerators in 2026. As a result, the system is expected to be fully operational in 2027 or 2028.