Bull has reopened its expanded factory in Angers, France ,and is nowdelivering twelve racks per month, doubling its production capacity. Next year, that figure could double again to 24. The French supercomputer manufacturer says it has received more orders this year than ever before.
The expansion cost 80 million euros, Bull executives told Reuters. The Angers plant is the only one in Europe dedicated entirely to building supercomputers. Demand for these systems is particularly strong within the EU: between 2021 and 2027, the EU is allocating 7 billion euros for a network of supercomputers to narrow the gap with the U.S. and China.
Bull won 15 of the 18 tenders issued by EuroHPC, the EU body that funds the supercomputer network in collaboration with member states. It competed against companies such as HPE. Bull is also very active in the private sector, for example, working to triple the simulation capacity of aircraft manufacturer Airbus with systems at its factories in Toulouse and Hamburg.
Two major orders at once
Bull can now build two major projects in parallel, something it was previously unable to do. These are the French Alice Recoque, comprising 94 racks, and the Finnish LUMI-AI, valued at 388 million euros, the largest contract in the company’s history. Alice Recoque is being built with AMD and will cost the French government and the EU a combined 554 million euros. Delivery will take place in phases starting at the end of this year. According to CSC, LUMI-AI is expected to increase LUMI’s AI capacity tenfold and is expected to become operational in the second half of 2027.
Late last year, Bull already delivered JUPITER in Jülich, Germany, Europe’s first exascale supercomputer. OVHcloud and Domyn are attempting to train frontier AI models on it, something that has not yet been achieved in Europe.
Back in French hands
Since March 31, Bull has been owned by the French government, which acquired the company from Atos at a valuation of up to 404 million euros. Prior to that, the Bull brand name was reinstated, replacing Eviden. According to CEO Emmanuel Le Roux, this was a strategic decision. When the U.S. stopped supplying supercomputers to the nuclear agency CEA in the 1980s, France turned to Bull to simulate nuclear tests.
Seventy percent of the components are now European, compared to 20 to 30 percent five years ago. Depending on the customer, Bull still uses processors from Nvidia, AMD, or Intel; for x86 systems and large-scale GPUs, this is also unavoidable.