The Barcelona Supercomputing Center - National Supercomputing Center (BSC-CNS), home to the MareNostrum 5 supercomputer, will be one of the seven Artificial Intelligence Factories selected by the European Union to develop an ecosystem of advanced AI systems and will receive an investment of around 200 million euros. The total investments for the program announced by the European Commission will reach 1.5 billion euros, distributed among various participating countries and the EU itself.
The supercomputer MareNostrum 5, located at BSC-CNS (Xavier Cervera)
The Ministry of Science, Innovation, and Universities has announced that the contribution it will make along with the Ministry of Digital Transformation and the Civil Service will be 62 million euros, to which must be added another 14 million euros from the Government of Catalonia and contributions from other countries such as Portugal, Turkey, and Romania, reaching a total of 98.86 million euros. The EU institution that channels these investments, the European Joint Undertaking for High-Performance Computing (EuroHPC JU), will invest 98.33 million euros.
The approved BSC proposal includes an expansion of MareNostrum 5's supercomputing capacity, which will feature state-of-the-art AI accelerator technology for training and developing large-scale generative AI models. Similar to the upcoming chip development, the proposal aims to maintain European technological independence and sovereignty in artificial intelligence, making it accessible to both public services and the private sector.
The seven AI factories will be installed, in addition to Barcelona, in Bologna (Italy), Kajaani (Finland), Bissen (Luxembourg), Linköping (Sweden), Stuttgart (Germany), and Athens (Greece). In the case of the AI Factories in BSC and Finland, they will also have an experimental platform “that will provide cutting-edge infrastructure to develop and test innovative AI models and applications, and will promote collaboration throughout Europe,” according to a statement from the European Commission.
Henna Virkkunen, Executive Vice President of Technological Sovereignty, Security, and Democracy of the EU, has pointed out that “thanks to European supercomputers, new AI startups will be able to innovate and grow.” “Now we are ready to lead our ambition for the EU to become the AI continent with the appropriate infrastructure,” she indicated. “We are on track to make the AI factories initiative a reality in the first 100 days of the new European Commission. We expect a second wave of proposals on February 1st.”
