France to host Europe’s 2nd exascale supercomputer with Eviden and AMD

Eviden and AMD have been chosen to build Alice Recoque, France’s first exascale supercomputer and Europe’s second.

Designed to support high-performance computing (HPC) and AI, Alice Recoque is named after Alice Arnaud Recoque, a pioneering French computer scientist and AI expert.

The supercomputer will deliver peak performance surpassing one exaflop per second — a billion billion calculations per second — vastly accelerating scientific simulations, climate modelling and healthcare research.

Its computing power is equivalent to more calculations than humanity could perform in four years of nonstop mental effort, multiplying previous capacities by 50 while increasing power use by only five times.

Led by France’s GENCI and operated by the CEA research centre, the system will cost 554 million euros over five years. It will be built on Eviden’s BullSequana XH3500 platform with AMD Venice EPYC CPUs, MI430X GPUs and FPGAs.

With 94 racks and warm water cooling, the supercomputer will achieve up to 50 percent better energy efficiency per GPU compared to existing exascale systems, consuming just 12 megawatts on average workloads.

“Hosted at CEA’s TGCC, Alice Recoque will empower researchers and industries to address critical challenges — from climate modelling to healthcare innovation. It is a cornerstone for what we will achieve together, for science, progress, and the French and European digital future,” said Philippe Baptiste, French Minister for Higher Education, Research and Space.

Alice Recoque underscores Europe’s growing presence in supercomputing, following Germany’s Jupiter supercomputer, and is expected to be operational by late 2026 pending AMD chip availability.

“Alice Recoque represents another critical step toward Europe’s digital future, defined by a sovereignty, sustainability and scientific excellence. Born from a shared European vision, this AI factory reflects on what we can achieve collectively toward a common goal,” said Emmanuel Le Roux, Group SVP and Global Head of Advanced Computing and AI at Eviden, Atos Group’s advanced computing brand.

“The Alice Recoque supercomputer represents a major step forward for European sovereign AI, uniting national ambition, regional collaboration, and AMD’s high-performance and AI compute technologies,” said Dan McNamara, Senior Vice President of Compute and Enterprise AI at AMD.