CSC offers to help South African researchers reach Finland’s Lumi supercomputer
According to TechCentral, CSC – IT Center for Science has offered to help South African researchers gain access to the LUMI Supercomputer. The two countries have no formal AI research agreement yet.
Martti Asikainen |30.10.2026 | Photo by Lumi Supercomputer / CSC
CSC – IT Centre for Science, the Finnish company that runs Lumi, one of Europe’s most powerful supercomputers, has offered to help South African researchers gain access to the machine.
Finland and South Africa are trying to build a formal partnership on artificial intelligence.
The offer came at a South Africa-Finland dialogue on AI, hosted by the Finnish embassy at the National Research Foundation in Pretoria on Thursday.
Universities in both countries are already talking, but South African official Daan du Toit told TechCentral there was “no formal collaboration agreement yet”. He said the dialogue was meant to lay the foundation for one.
Training, visits and a route to Lumi
CSC’s Director of International Collaborations and Partnerships, Damien Le Carpentier, set out the offer, according to TechCentral. CSC would host South African staff and experts for short stays and provide training and exchanges for students and early-career researchers. It would also help researchers and companies reach Lumi or Finnish AI expertise, and is open to joint bids for EU funding.
There is a catch. South African researchers cannot apply for time on Lumi alone, because the lead researcher on any project must be based in the EU or a country associated with its research programmes, according to Lumi’s guidance. Partnering with European groups is the main route in.
Du Toit, a deputy director-general at South Africa’s Department of science, technology and innovation, said the government was willing to put money into the effort.
He wants Finland involved in the Presidential PhD Programme. President Cyril Ramaphosa announced the programme in December 2023 with an initial R1bn from the National Skills Fund, and AI research is among the skills it targets.
Too big for one country
Lumi sits in a former paper mill in Kajaani. Its GPU partition has 2,978 nodes with four AMD GPUs each, 11,912 in all. A separate partition has more than 262,000 processor cores for conventional workloads. Lumi’s published figures put its sustained Linpack performance at 379.7 petaflops, against a theoretical peak of 531.5. The centre says it runs on hydropower, and its waste heat warms hundreds of households in Kajaani.
The machine is funded jointly by the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking, the EU body that funds and allocates supercomputer time, and a group of European countries led by Finland. Le Carpentier said Finland could afford a machine of that size only by pooling money with others.
A new AI-focused system is planned. In August the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking signed a €387.8m contract with Bull for LUMI-AI, due in Kajaani in the second half of 2027. Costs are split equally between EuroHPC and a six-country consortium of Finland, Czechia, Denmark, Estonia, Norway and Poland.
Buying hardware is the easy part, Le Carpentier warned. A supercomputer lasts about five years, so funding must be renewed constantly, and each generation costs more. Without a surrounding ecosystem of skills and services, he said, the machine is of little use.
The gap at home
South Africa’s own capacity is far smaller. Jabu Mtsweni of the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) said the Centre for High Performance Computing in Cape Town has GPU clusters, though limited ones.
Its flagship, Lengau, was installed in 2016 at about one petaflop, then the fastest machine in Africa. A 4 petaflop replacement is due to come online in phases, and the national cyberinfrastructure programme has been allocated R292m (about $18.2m) for 2026/27, part of which funds it. Mtsweni said he hoped the new machine would put South Africa back on the world rankings. He said the computing gap remains and described sovereignty as a journey rather than an event.
Policy is also under strain. Communications minister Solly Malatsi withdrew South Africa’s draft national AI policy in April after it emerged that its reference list contained fictitious sources, apparently AI-generated. Mtsweni said AI adoption is outpacing policy.
No formal agreement between the two countries has been signed yet.
