The European Union has awarded a €387.8 million contract to the French state-owned company Bull AI to build an artificial-intelligence-optimized supercomputer to be installed in an existing data center in Finland, the Handelsblatt reported. The system is scheduled to be put into service in the second half of 2027.
Bull AI formed from Atos units
Bull AI was created several months ago from strategic units of the financially troubled IT group Atos after the French state bought out those businesses. The newly awarded €387.8 million contract is the company's largest to date and has been described as a lifeline following Bull AI's recent origins in a near-bankrupt entity.
EuroHPC expansion and capacity constraints
The supercomputer will be built for EuroHPC, the European Union's supercomputing agency and the manager of the AI Gigafactory initiative. To date, EuroHPC has established 19 AI data centers with roughly a dozen supercomputers using its multi-billion-euro budget. The network includes systems such as the Jupiter supercomputer at the Jülich research center in Germany.
Evangelos Floros, EuroHPC's infrastructure director, has emphasized that demand for compute capacity exceeds available supply, and that the network will be expanded further in the coming years. EuroHPC-financed systems are used, among other things, to train European AI models.
Hungary's participation in the AI Gigafactory
Through the EU's AI Gigafactory initiative, member states and institutions are contributing to build large-scale computing capacity. Hungary has committed €500 million of recovery funds to the program, according to the report.
Why this matters
The contract is both a strategic win for the French state-owned Bull AI and part of the EU's broader effort to increase computing resources for AI research and development. The investment reflects the bloc's prioritization of AI infrastructure expansion over the coming years.
An AI assistant contributed to preparing parts of this article; the final content was edited and verified by a journalist.
