Eviden set to build France’s first exascale supercomputer with AMD at the wheel

Steven

Eviden set to build France’s first exascale supercomputer with AMD at the wheel

Summary

France will get its first exascale supercomputer, Alice Recoque, built by Eviden (an Atos subsidiary) with funding from the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking totalling €544 million. The modular system will launch with AMD’s upcoming ‘Venice’ EPYC CPUs and Instinct MI430X GPUs, and a later partition will add SiPearl-based CPU nodes. The installation at GENCI in Paris will use 94 racks of Eviden’s BullSequana XH3500 architecture with fanless direct liquid cooling, AMD FPGAs, DDN storage and Eviden’s BXI v3 interconnect. Initial deployment is expected by late 2026, with the general-purpose CPU partition arriving in 2027, and the system targets roughly 12 megawatts for average workloads to improve energy efficiency while supporting both AI and traditional HPC jobs.

Key Points

  • €544M EuroHPC-funded Alice Recoque will be France’s first exascale system and Europe’s second exascale installation.
  • Initial partition uses AMD ‘Venice’ EPYC CPUs and Instinct MI430X GPUs; a later partition will incorporate SiPearl Rhea2 CPUs.
  • The system comprises 94 racks of BullSequana XH3500 hardware with fanless direct liquid cooling and BXI v3 networking (switches up to 800 Gbps).
  • Designed as an ‘AI Factory’ while also supporting conventional HPC workloads like modelling and simulation; includes AMD FPGAs and DDN storage.
  • Aims for energy efficiency — around 12 megawatts for average workloads, lower than many comparable exascale systems.

Why should I read this?

Because it’s big news for European compute — France is joining the exascale club and AMD’s stack is central. If you follow research compute, AI infrastructure or where large-scale horsepower will sit next, this is worth a quick read. Short version: big machine, big money, real implications.

Author style

Punchy: This is headline material — €544M, exascale performance and clear momentum for European sovereign HPC. Read the detail if you need to know hardware choices, timelines and why energy efficiency will shape sustained AI workloads.

Context and Relevance

Alice Recoque strengthens Europe’s strategic HPC capacity following Jupiter and reflects trends toward heterogeneous systems that mix CPUs, GPUs, FPGAs and high-bandwidth interconnects for mixed AI and simulation tasks. It’s relevant to research centres, infrastructure vendors and policymakers monitoring Europe’s ability to host large-scale AI and scientific workloads domestically.

Source

Source: https://go.theregister.com/2025/11/18/eviden_france_exascale/