The “Jules Verne” consortium has finally made its choice. In a massive €554 million deal, the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking (EuroHPC JU) has selected Eviden and AMD to build Europe’s newest technological titan, an exascale supercomputer named “Alice Recoque”.
Hosted at the CEA’s Très Grand Centre de Calcul (TGCC) south of Paris, which recently welcomed the photonic quantum computer Lucy, Alice Recoque is not just another fast calculator. It is officially designated as an “AI Factory.” While most supercomputers today are built on current-generation hardware, Alice Recoque is designed to be future-proof, relying on chips that haven’t even hit the public market yet.
What makes the exascale supercomputer Alice Recoque different?
To understand why this machine is special, we have to look at the “brain” and the “nervous system.” Most current top-tier supercomputers rely heavily on Nvidia hardware and InfiniBand networking. Alice Recoque takes a different path, one focused on European independence and next-gen efficiency.
The system is built on Eviden’s BullSequana XH3500 architecture. This is a direct liquid-cooled beast that uses water to cool 100% of its components, processors, GPUs, and switches. This eliminates the need for energy-hungry fans and allows the system to achieve incredible efficiency, a critical requirement when you are running a machine that consumes megawatts of power.
But the real headline is the “nervous system.” Instead of using American standard networking, the machine uses Eviden’s BXI v3 (BullSequana eXascale Interconnect). This is a European-designed high-speed network that ensures data flows efficiently and securely, without relying on foreign tech giants for the most critical communication pathways.
Under the hood: A beast for AI workloads
The raw power of Alice Recoque comes from a partnership with AMD that pushes the envelope of what is currently possible.
- The CPU: The system will be powered by AMD’s next-generation EPYC processors, codenamed “Venice.” These are based on the future Zen 6 architecture, promising massive core counts and efficiency gains over today’s chips.
- The AI Engine: This is where it gets exciting for AI enthusiasts. The machine utilizes AMD Instinct MI430X accelerators.
- Why does this matter? These chips feature 432 GB of HBM4 memory per GPU.
- Compare that to today’s standard AI chips (which often have 80GB to 141GB), and you see the advantage. This massive memory pool allows researchers to load gigantic Large Language Models (LLMs) directly onto the chips, speeding up training times exponentially.
With a memory bandwidth of 19.6 TB/s, the system feeds data to these processors at lightning speeds, ensuring the hardware is never waiting for information.
Strategic sovereignty: Made in Europe
Alice Recoque is more than a scientific tool; it is a political statement. The project is funded 50% by the EuroHPC JU and 50% by the Jules Verne Consortium (which includes France’s GENCI, the Netherlands’ SURF, and Greece’s GRNET).
The goal is “Technological Sovereignty.” By using Eviden’s interconnect and integrating a specific partition of SiPearl Rhea2 processors (CPUs designed entirely in Europe), the EU is proving it can build world-class infrastructure without being 100% dependent on US or Asian supply chains.
Alice’s purpose: Applications that matter
So, what do you do with an Exascale “AI Factory”? You solve problems that are too complex for standard computers, or even standard supercomputers.
- The AI Factory: The machine is specifically architected to train massive generative AI models. This gives European startups and researchers the computing power needed to compete with Silicon Valley giants.
- Digital Twins: Researchers will create “digital twins” of the human body for personalized medicine, simulating how a specific patient might react to a drug before it is ever administered.
- Climate & Energy: From modeling the precise effects of climate change to designing new materials for cleaner batteries, Alice Recoque provides the simulation power needed to accelerate the green transition.
Who is Alice Recoque?
Alice Recoque (1929–2021) was a pioneering French computer scientist and engineer whose innovative work spanned the foundational era of modern computing to the dawn of artificial intelligence. After graduating from the ESPCI in 1954, she played a critical role in the development of the CAB500 (1960), a conversational desk-sized mini-computer that predated the personal computer revolution by decades.
Later, at CII (Compagnie Internationale pour l’Informatique), she led the design of the Mitra 15, a highly successful industrial mini-computer used widely in telecommunications and nuclear research during the 1970s. Beyond hardware, Recoque was a forward-thinker who directed the AI mission at Groupe Bull in the 1980s, focusing on massively parallel architectures and natural language processing. A strong advocate for ethics in technology, she also participated in the creation of the CNIL (France’s data privacy regulatory body).
A win for science
Installation of this massive system is scheduled to begin in 2026, with the machine becoming fully operational for researchers in 2027.
Named after Alice Recoque, the pioneering French computer scientist who helped design the earliest mini-computers and focused on AI long before it was a buzzword, this system honors the past while aggressively building the future. With this deal, Europe isn’t just buying a computer; it is building a fortress for its scientific and artificial intelligence future.
