Europe enters the exascale supercomputing league with ‘JUPITER’

The new JUPITER supercomputer, inaugurated by Commissioner Zaharieva and German Chancellor Friedrich Merz at Forschungszentrum Jülich in Germany, has officially become the first European system to achieve the exascale threshold – that is, performing more than one quintillion (10¹⁸) operations per second, a computing power level comparable to aggregating the computing capabilities of the mobile phones of the EU’s entire population. With this milestone, Europe enters the global league of high‑performance computing.

Officially ranked as Europe’s most powerful supercomputer and the fourth fastest worldwide, JUPITER combines unmatched performance with a strong focus on sustainability. The system runs entirely on renewable energy and features cutting-edge cooling and energy reuse, making it the world’s most energy-efficient supercomputer module, as confirmed by its number‑one position on the Green500 ranking.

With computing power exceeding one exaflop, JUPITER will transform science, innovation, and policymaking across Europe. Researchers will now be able to run climate and weather models at kilometre‑scale resolution, enabling much more precise forecasts of extreme events such as heatwaves, heavy storms, and floods.

JUPITER will support the development and deployment of AI solutions; its supercomputing capability will support the future AI Factory (JAIF) announced in March 2025, which will train cutting-edge large language models (LLMs) for generative AI and next‑generation digital technologies.

JUPITER represents a €500 million joint investment by the EU and Germany channelled through the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking. It is part of Europe’s wider strategy to develop a network of AI Gigafactories: large-scale, energy‑efficient computing hubs dedicated to training and deploying frontier AI models.

Background

The European High Performance Computing Joint Undertaking (EuroHPC) has already selected 13 proposals to establish and operate AI Factories across Europe.

AI Factories will bring together the key ingredients that are needed for success in AI: computing power, data, and talent. They will provide access to the massive computing power that start-ups, industry and researchers need to develop their AI models and systems. For example, European large language models or specialised vertical AI models focusing on specific sectors or domains.

On 30 June 2025, the Commission has also announced an overwhelming number of proposals to set up European AI Gigafactories, with 76 expressions of interest across 16 Member States.

The AI Gigafactories concept builds on the AI Factories initiative, harnessing Europe’s cutting-edge EuroHPC supercomputing network to realise the EU’s ambition of becoming the world’s leading AI continent. AI Gigafactories will be state-of-the-art, large-scale AI compute and data storage hubs, purpose-built to develop, train, and deploy next-generation AI models and applications at hyperscale, e.g. models with hundreds of trillions of parameters. By integrating vast computing power, energy-efficient data centres, and AI-driven automation, these facilities will set new benchmarks for AI model training, inference, and deployment.

More information: European Commission