EuroHPC Joint Undertaking (EuroHPC JU) has signed the contract with technology supplier Bull to build LUMI-AI, the new European supercomputer for artificial intelligence, at CSC's data centre in Kajaani, Finland. Norway is one of six partner countries through Sigma2, and Norway's share alone provides more computing power and storage than the whole of Olivia, Norway's most powerful supercomputer.
Norway is contributing €20.4 million, around NOK 220 million. The procurement is carried out by a consortium led by CSC (IT Center for Science) in Finland, together with Norway, Denmark, Estonia, Poland and Czechia. The total budget for the LUMI AI Factory initiative is over €612 million, in excess of NOK 6.6 billion, with EuroHPC and the partner countries each covering half.
Should Norway use artificial intelligence on our own terms, we need access to computing power that sits in Europe and follows European rules. That's digital sovereignty in practice.
Hildegunn Vada, Managing Director of Sigma2.
The Bull contract, which covers the hardware, is worth €387.8 million.
Norway's share is just over 3 per cent of the machine.
That sounds modest, but since LUMI-AI comes on top of Olivia, it means Norwegian research, public administration and business will get access to considerably more computing power and storage than today. Norwegian users will thus be able to run AI models at a scale that far exceeds what Sigma2 has available today.
Hans Eide, Special Adviser at Sigma2
The supercomputer is built on Bull's BullSequana XH3500 architecture, with AMD Instinct™ MI430X GPUs and sixth-generation AMD EPYC™ processors. According to CSC, the system will deliver ten times the AI capacity of today's LUMI. The facility will run on 100 per cent renewable energy, with surplus heat reused in Kajaani's district heating network. LUMI-AI is complemented by the quantum computer LUMI-IQ, delivered by IQM Quantum Computers, and together the two systems will form a leading hybrid computing platform for high-performance computing, AI and quantum computing. The LUMI-AI Factory Service Centre, of which Sigma2's KI-fabrikken is part, is already in place to help ensure the best possible use of the platform.
The system enters operation in the second half of 2027.
