EuroHPC signs €387.8m deal for LUMI-AI supercomputer, tenfold AI capacity boost planned for Finland
The EuroHPC Joint Undertaking has contracted Bull, the French supercomputing firm now owned by the French State, to build LUMI-AI, a system expected to deliver ten times the AI processing capacity of the current LUMI supercomputer when it comes online in Kajaani in the second half of 2027.
Text by Martti Asikainen, 31.8.2026 | Photo by LUMI AI Factory
The European High Performance Computing Joint Undertaking (EuroHPC JU) has signed a procurement contract with Bull to deliver a new supercomputer named LUMI-AI, according to a media release published by CSC – IT Center for Science on 31 August. Bull was formerly part of the Atos group’s Eviden division but was fully separated and sold to the French State in March 2026, making it an independent, state-owned company.
The system is expected to provide a tenfold increase in artificial intelligence capacity and nearly double the general high-performance computing capability of the existing LUMI supercomputer, the release states. The total contract value, covering acquisition, delivery, installation and maintenance, is €387.8 million, funded equally by EuroHPC JU and the LUMI AI Factory consortium.
Built for AI workloads
LUMI-AI will become the computing backbone of the LUMI AI Factory, a programme intended to support both industrial AI development and academic research. The system is designed to handle AI training and inference alongside large-scale scientific simulations.
It will run on Bull’s BullSequana XH3500 architecture, built around AMD’s next-generation Instinct MI430X graphics processing units and 256-core EPYC processors. IBM will supply the storage system, while Nokia will provide the data centre networking that connects to Bull’s proprietary interconnect technology.
“Europe’s next wave of AI innovation will depend on infrastructure that is open, efficient and trusted,” said Thomas Zacharia, Senior Vice President for Global Public Sector and Strategic Partnerships at AMD. The comment reflects AMD’s role as a hardware supplier to the project rather than an independent assessment of its impact.
Who owns it, and where
LUMI-AI will be owned by EuroHPC JU and hosted by the LUMI AI Factory consortium, which spans six countries: Finland, Czechia, Denmark, Estonia, Norway and Poland. It is scheduled for deployment in the second half of 2027 at a new CSC data centre in the Renforsin Ranta business park in Kajaani, a city in northern Finland already home to the current LUMI supercomputer.
“With LUMI-AI, EuroHPC JU has now signed its sixth AI Factory procurement contract for a next-generation AI-optimised supercomputer,” said Anders Jensen, EuroHPC JU’s executive director, adding that the network of systems is intended to give European SMEs and startups access to large-scale computing resources.
Kimmo Koski, managing director of CSC, said the new system would work alongside LUMI-IQ, a quantum computing platform being delivered separately by Finnish firm IQM Quantum Computers and housed in the same data centre. Pekka Manninen, director of the LUMI AI Factory, said the combination was expected to support workloads that blend simulation, machine learning and quantum algorithms.
Sixth of its kind
According to the release, LUMI-AI will be powered entirely by renewable energy and designed to capture and reuse excess heat, feeding it into Kajaani’s district heating network. CSC describes the approach as helping to increase the share of the city’s district heating drawn from data centre waste heat, though the release does not specify what proportion this will represent once LUMI-AI is operational.
LUMI-AI is the sixth AI Factory supercomputer procured under the EuroHPC scheme, part of a wider European push to build sovereign AI infrastructure rather than rely on computing capacity based outside Europe. Emmanuel Le Roux, chief executive of Bull, framed the contract as reinforcing “Europe’s technological autonomy” in AI infrastructure — a description consistent with Bull’s own positioning since its separation from Atos and transfer to French state ownership.
All assessments of the system’s significance in this account come from the companies and public bodies delivering it. Independent figures on comparable systems elsewhere in Europe, and on how quickly the promised tenfold AI capacity increase will translate into usable research output, are not included in the release.
