Bull is selected to build LUMI-AI, a AI supercomputer for the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking and the LUMI AI Factory consortium boasting €387.8 million in funding. The system will deploy at CSC’s data center in Kajaani in the middle of Finland, in the second half of 2027. Its compute will be entirely AMD-built.
The contract is the sixth AI Factory procurement signed by EuroHPC JU. Funding is split evenly between the public-private EuroHPC Joint Undertaking, which owns the system, and the consortium behind it, consisting of EU members Finland, Czechia, Denmark, Estonia, Norway and Poland.
What does that money buy? According to Bull, LUMI-AI delivers a tenfold increase in AI capacity compared to the current LUMI system, and nearly doubles its HPC capability. LUMI has been operating at CSC since 2021 and was long described as Europe’s most powerful classical supercomputer. CSC managing director Kimmo Koski points to the combination with the LUMI-IQ quantum computer for research in health, climate and disruptive technologies.
AMD hardware, European interconnect
The machine uses Bull’s BullSequana XH3500 architecture. That is the successor line to the XH3000 platform underpinning JUPITER, Europe’s first exascale supercomputer in Jülich, though JUPITER’s accelerators come from Nvidia rather than AMD. IBM supplies storage based on IBM Storage Scale. Nokia contributes data center networking, alongside Bull’s own BXI interconnect.
AMD is relatively common among large-scale European supercomputers. Earlier this year the chipmaker and Eviden were selected for another exascale system in France.
Warm water and district heating
Cooling runs through Bull’s patented Direct Liquid Cooling, which uses warm water. Excess heat feeds into Kajaani’s district heating network, and the facility runs entirely on renewable electricity. Bull CEO Emmanuel Le Roux said the project “further confirms the strength of Bull’s technological leadership and latest innovations.”