Bull’s logo on its factory in Angers, France. Credit: Bull Bull, the French state-owned supercomputer maker, has doubled production at its factory in Angers, western France, after an €80 million rebuild. The plant now assembles 12 racks a month, up from six, executives told Reuters, which first reported the expansion on Thursday. Output could rise to 24 racks next year if demand continues to grow.
Bull formally opened the new production building on Friday. According to the company, Angers is the only site in Europe that can assemble supercomputers at large scale, and the wider reconstruction of the site will be finished in 2028. The extra space lets Bull build two large orders side by side for the first time. The first is Alice Recoque, a 94-rack exascale system for France’s atomic energy commission, the CEA.
Exascale machines can perform at least one quintillion calculations per second. The second is LUMI-AI, a €387.8 million system for Kajaani, Finland, and the largest contract in Bull’s history. Both machines are due in 2027, Bull said. Reuters, however, reported that Alice Recoque will arrive in stages from the end of this year, at a cost of €554 million to France and the EU.
Chief executive Emmanuel Le Roux told Reuters that Bull has signed more orders this year than at any time before. He added that Bull has won 15 of the 18 tenders run by EuroHPC, the EU body that co-funds Europe’s supercomputers, beating rivals such as Hewlett Packard Enterprise. Bull also built JUPITER, Europe’s first exascale supercomputer, which runs at the Jülich research centre in Germany. Cloud provider OVHcloud and Italian AI company Domyn are both trying to train frontier-class AI models on it, according to Reuters.
The French state became Bull’s sole shareholder on 31 March, when it completed the purchase of the business from Atos. Reuters reported that the deal valued Bull at up to €404 million. “It is imperative that France and Europe retain control over their own computing capabilities,” said Roland Lescure, France’s economy minister. The Angers plant builds machines with Nvidia, AMD, or Intel processors, or with European parts, depending on the customer. European-made components now make up about 70% of the systems, compared with 20% to 30% five years ago, executives told Reuters.
Next, Bull plans to use the site for AI servers. Under a partnership agreed with Foxconn in June, Foxconn will manufacture parts of Nvidia’s Vera Rubin NVL72 systems in the Czech Republic, with final assembly in Angers. Bull said it will name further manufacturing partners in early 2027.
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