The “Land of Baguette” is moving its AI supercomputer plan to the next phase, with AMD and Eviden together announcing that they will be in charge of ‘Alice Recoque’ to further strengthen sovereign AI within the European region.
The new system will be the EU’s 2nd ever exascale system, designed to serve everything from climate modeling and healthcare to advanced materials research and next-gen AI models. The whole project is backed by EuroHPC JU with a total cost of 554M euros, supported by the Digital Europe Programme and the Jules Verne Consortium involving France, the Netherlands, and Greece.
Specifically, it will be powered by AMD’s next-gen EPYC CPUs codenamed Venice, the new Instinct MI430X GPUs with massive HBM4 memory, plus AMD FPGAs, all tied together with Eviden’s BXI network and built into the BullSequana XH3500 platform with DDN storage.
Despite its power, the system is designed to be super efficient. With just 94 racks, it uses 25 percent fewer components than typical exascale machines and delivers up to 50 percent better energy efficiency per GPU that comes with a whopping 432GB HBM4 memory to chew through FP4 and FP8 data types. Meanwhile, Eviden’s Argos software helps optimize energy use in real time, while its warm-water liquid cooling keeps everything both sustainable and high-performance.
AMD’s Dan McNamara framed the system as a major step forward for European sovereign AI, saying it blends national ambition, regional collaboration, and AMD’s latest compute technologies, while Eviden’s Emmanuel Le Roux described it as a catalyst for breakthroughs across Europe and a symbol of what can be accomplished when countries work toward a shared digital vision.
