Philippe Baptiste, French Minister for Higher Education, Research and Space, declared: “The selection of Eviden to build Alice Recoque, Europe’s new exascale supercomputer, is a major step forward for France and Europe. This project embodies our shared ambition in the field of high-performance computing, AI, and quantum technologies, while reinforcing our technological leadership. Hosted at CEA’s TGCC, Alice Recoque will empower researchers and industries to address critical challenges—from climate modeling to healthcare innovation. It is a cornerstone for what we will achieve together, for science, progress, and the French and European digital future."
“On the occasion of the Summit on Digital Sovereignty on the 18th of November, we reaffirm with other European member states our ambition: to strengthen our European digital champions. The selection of Eviden to equip the Alice Recoque supercomputer is a concrete example of Europe acting collectively to make digital sovereignty a reality. Alice Recoque will become a key pillar for the future of quantum computing and artificial intelligence. It is a source of pride to see French companies play a central role in this advancement” declared Anne Le Hénanff, French Minister of State for AI and Digital Affairs.
“Europe’s experience shows that technological sovereignty is achieved through cooperation and long-term vision. Greece’s participation in the Alice Recoque supercomputer project reflects our commitment to a strong, competitive European tech ecosystem and aligns with our National AI Strategy implemented under Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis. Alice Recoque opens new opportunities for collaboration and innovation, giving Greek startups, researchers, and academic institutions access to cutting-edge tools and positioning Greece at the forefront of global AI developments” stated the Minister of Digital Governance of Greece, Dimitris Papastergiou.
Logo of Alice Recoque ©GENCI
This new European Exascale is acquired by the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking (EuroHPC JU) and co-funded by France, the Netherlands and Greece, represented respectively by GENCI, together with the CEA, by SURFand by GRNET. The project represents a total investment of € 554 million over five years of operations. The installation and deployment will start in 2026.
Named Alice Recoque, a pioneering French computer scientist and one of the first women engineers in artificial intelligence, this supercomputer will be hosted in France, at the CEA’s TGCC in Bruyères-le-Châtel near Paris. The computing center has achieved all the preparatory works to adapt its infrastructure to receive Alice Recoque.
Alice Recoque will be powered by next-gen AMD EPYC CPUs, codenamed “Venice”, AMD Instinct™ MI430X GPUs engineered for sovereign AI and scientific applications, as well as a dedicated scalar partition based on SiPEARL Rhea2 processors, all being interconnected with next-gen Eviden BXI v3 European high-performance network system. This supercomputer will deliver a computing capacity exceeding one Exaflop/s (one billion billion operations per second) in double precision for HPC and more AI processing power than the leading supercomputers in the world today. Featuring 432 GB of HBM4 and 19.6 TB/s of memory bandwidth[1], AMD Instinct MI430X GPUs will enable Alice Recoque to be among the most powerful and energy-efficient scientific instruments ever built and made available in Europe.
Alice Recoque will provide a unique computing platform for a wide range of European research and innovation initiatives and also address the challenges posed by large amounts of observational, experimental and simulation data, as well as AI applications.
Conceptual design of Alice Recoque exascale supercomputer ©EVIDEN
Quotes
EuroHPC JU
Anders Jensen, EuroHPC JU Executive Director stated “As Europe has officially entered the exascale era, I am delighted to soon welcome Alice Recoque to our EuroHPC fleet. This groundbreaking exascale supercomputer, powered by pioneering European technologies, will elevate scientific discovery, industrial innovation, and technological sovereignty to the next level, while ensuring exceptional energy efficiency.”
GENCI
“In the global race to harness computing power as the engine of scientific discovery and innovation, EuroHPC’s decision to select Eviden and embrace sovereign technologies for the Alice Recoque Exascale supercomputer marks a defining milestone for Europe and France. Building on a collaborative journey that began three years ago, GENCI and all members of the Jules Verne consortium are extremely proud in their pivotal role in bringing this groundbreaking Exascale system to life—a true game changer for research and industry. By paving the path toward post-Exascale services, Alice Recoque will propel Europe “Beyond HPC,” federating high-performance computing, artificial intelligence, and quantum technologies to empower science, accelerate innovation, and strengthen our technological sovereignty and global competitiveness” declared Philippe Lavocat, CEO of GENCI
CEA
“As a key player in supercomputing, CEA and its teams are ready, eager and proud to host and operate the Alice Recoque exascale supercomputer at TGCC. This is a strong recognition of our expertise in building major research infrastructures and of our teams skills throughout the value chain.
The CEA welcomes EuroHPC's selection of a machine integrating numerous European technological and software components for this project, including Eviden's BXI network and SiPearl's Rhea2 processor, which have long been supported by the CEA. We congratulate Eviden on winning the tender for this new European Flagship for research. Europe is thereby demonstrating its unity and reaffirming its leadership in the field of HPC and AI, a strategy that is in line with the CEA's vision” declared Anne-Isabelle Etienvre, General Administrator of the CEA
SURF
“We are proud to be part of this extraordinary project. Alice Recoque will not only help our scientist with access to cutting edge compute power, but will also strengthen the European sovereignty. ‘’ declared Valeriu Codreanu, manager Compute Services at SURF
Eviden
Emmanuel Le Roux, Group SVP, Global Head of Advanced Computing and AI, Eviden at Atos said “Alice Recoque represents another critical step toward Europe’s digital future, defined by a sovereignty, sustainability and scientific excellence. As a catalyst for scientific and industrial breakthroughs, from climate modeling and healthcare to advanced materials and AI innovation, it will empower researchers and industries across Europe. Born from a shared European vision, this AI Factory reflects on what we can achieve collectively toward a common goal. Eviden is fully dedicated to its success, bringing deep expertise, a collaborative spirit, and a long-term dedication to responsible technological leadership.”
About
EuroHPC JU
The EuroHPC JU is a legal and funding entity that brings together the European Union and participating countries to coordinate efforts and pool resources with the objective of making Europe a world leader in supercomputing.
To equip Europe with a cutting-edge supercomputing infrastructure, the EuroHPC JU has already procured 11 supercomputers, distributed across Europe including JUPITER in Germany, Europe’s first exascale system.
European scientists and users from the public sector and industry can benefit from EuroHPC supercomputers via the EuroHPC Access Calls no matter where in Europe they are located, to advance science and support the development of a wide range of applications with industrial, scientific and societal relevance for Europe.
Currently, the EuroHPC JU is also overseeing the implementation of 19 AI factories (AIF) across Europe, complemented by thirteen AI Factory Antennas, to offer free, customised support to SMEs and startups. Alice Recoque is at the heart of the AI Factory France project.
Additionally, the EuroHPC JU is deploying a European Quantum Computing infrastructure, integrating diverse European quantum computing technologies with existing supercomputers. EuroHPC JU has already inaugurated PIAST-Q in Poznań, Poland, VLQ in Ostrava, Czechia, and just last week, Ruby and Jade- the HPCQS quantum simulators, marking a milestone in Europe’s leap into the quantum era.
The EuroHPC JU also funds research and innovation projects to develop a full European supercomputing supply chain, from processors and software to applications to be run on these supercomputers and know-how to develop strong European HPC expertise.
GENCI
Created by the public authorities in 2007, GENCI (Grand Équipement National de Calcul Intensif) is a major research infrastructure. This public operator aims to democratise the use of digital simulation through high performance computing associated with the use of artificial intelligence, and quantum computing to support French scientific and industrial competitiveness.
GENCI is in charge of three missions:
- To implement the national strategy for the provision of high-performance computing resources, storage, massive data processing associated with Artificial Intelligence technologies and quantum computing, for the benefit of French scientific research, in conjunction with the 3 national computing centres (CEA/TGCC, CNRS/IDRIS, France Universités/CINES).
- Supporting the creation of an integrated ecosystem on a national and European level
- Promoting digital simulation and supercomputing to academic research and industry
GENCI is a civil company 49% owned by the State represented by the Ministry in charge of Higher Education and Research, 20% by the CEA, 20% by the CNRS, 10% by the Universities represented by France Universités and 1% by Inria.
Learn more at : www.genci.fr
CEA
The CEA is a public research organization that supports public policy decision-making and equips French and European businesses and communities with the scientific and technological means to better navigate four major societal transitions: energy transition, digital transition, future healthcare, and national/global security. Its mission is to ensure France and Europe maintain scientific, technological, and industrial leadership, contributing to a more secure and controlled present and future for all. The CEA is guided by three core values: curiosity, cooperation, and a strong sense of responsibility. This year CEA celebrates is 80s birthday.
Learn more at: www.cea.fr/english
Press Contacts:
- GENCI – Nicolas Belot I nicolas.belot@genci.fr I +33 7 60 99 95 10
- CEA - Guilhem Boyer I Guilhem.boyer@cea.fr I +33 6 73 41 42 45 | www.cea.fr
- EuroHPC JU – media@eurohpc-ju.europa.eu
To learn more – Technical specifications
1. A new generation of supercomputers
Beyond reaching Exascale Alice Recoque will deliver more AI processing power than some of the leading supercomputers in the world today. It will be powered by next-gen AMD Instinct MI430X GPUs and AMD EPYC processors, codenamed “Venice”, as well as SiPEARL Rhea2 processors partition all-together federated by a high-speed Eviden BXI v3 interconnect.
With the spirit to integrate European technologies using a state-of-the-art balanced and energy efficient architecture, Alice Recoque will be based on Eviden’s new HPC-AI , the BullSequana XH3500 platform,providing unprecedented density and cooling technologies.
Alice Recoque will offer various compute partitions including a so-called “unified compute partition” powered by 94 racks each using AMD EPYC CPUs and AMD Instinct MI430X GPUs in a memory-coherent configuration, allowing the execution of multi-tenant scalar and accelerated HPC/AI applications. Powered by AMD AI and HPC technologies, this compute partition will exceed a sustained performance of 1 Exaflop/s HPL performance while also providing the capability for training large AI frontier models thanks to a leadership 432 GB HBM4 and 19.6 TB/s of memory bandwidth on each AMD Instinct MI430X GPU. This exceptional performance will be reached with less than 15 MW of electrical power, making Alice Recoque a very energy-efficient system.
For scalar only workloads Alice Recoque will integrate a dedicated scalar partition with more than 100 000 cores using European SiPearl RHEA2 128-core ARM-based processors. Pre/post processing or large SMP workloads will be addressed by an additional partition.
All these compute partitions will be federated by Eviden’s high-speed BXI v3 interconnect using a DragonFly+ topology allowing endpoint connections between 400 to 800 Gb/s per CPU or GPU respectively, and will share access to a data-centric storage architecture.
The system will employ Eviden’ 5th generation DLC (Direct Liquid Cooling) warm-water cooling for the unified racks and chilled-door technologies for the scalar racks. It will be operated through a unified administration and resource-management framework based on CEA’ Ocean suite completed by Eviden’s proprietary management suite with widely used open-source components such as SLURM, Kubernetes, LUSTRE, Grafana and Prometheus.
Its architecture will offer several pre/post-processing and service computing partitions federated by a high-speed internal interconnection, sharing access to a data-centric storage architecture, and managed by a unified resource administration and management system.
2. Serving users and new usages
This system will be made available to a wide range of European researchers from academia and industry, as well as public services. A remote and secure access to Alice Recoque’ computing resources will be jointly managed by EuroHPC JU and the Jules Verne consortium (currently associating France, the Netherlands and Greece) in proportion to their investments, through project application and selection systems.
In parallel with the installation of the computer, an onboarding programme of the scientific communitieswill be launched in 2026 by GENCI and CEA with the support of Eviden, AMD and SiPEARL to prepare them for the arrival of Alice Recoque with its innovative architecture.
Alice Recoque will be instrumental in the development of AI Factory France, launched in November 2025, with the ambition of federating the French AI scientific, industrial and public services ecosystem by providing a unique one-stop shop of AI services spanning from access to sovereign public/private compute, expertise in HPC, AI and data, massive training programme, sharing of models, datasets and tools to international collaboration with others AI Factories and Antennas, applied to 13 application verticals including robotics, health, cybersecurity/defense, earth sciences, aeronautics, energy, agriculture, mobility or humanities to name a few.
As stated by its logo, in a post-Exascale vision set by the convergence of HPC, AI and Quantum Computing, Alice Recoque will improve the development of high-precision models to mitigate climate change, foster innovation in new materials and energy sources, support the creation of digital twins of the human body for personalized medicine or smart cities/factories, and train/infer next generation of European Frontier and agentic AI models. Its capabilities will also address the technological challenges of the digital revolution: processing using AI-driven scientific workflows large amounts of data generated by scientific instruments such as telescopes, satellites, accelerators, microscopes, IoT devices and AI applications, and the emergence of industrial and scientific hybrid quantum computing.
By benefiting from the first results of French (HQI) and European (HPCQS, EuroQCS-France and EuroQHPC-Integration) research projects on hybrid quantum computing, Alice Recoque will be one of the first Exascale system to propose several quantum processing units, based on photonics, neutral atoms or cat qubits, acting as accelerators of CPUs or GPUs for specific workloads in quantum chemistry, optimization or machine learning.
Finally, Alice Recoque is meant to be the testbed for the development and the integration of new European technologies in processors/accelerators, networks, storage, cooling and infrastructure as well as HPC/AI/QC middleware and end users’ applications.
3. About the logo of Alice Recoque Supercomputer
The logo of the Alice Recoque supercomputer aims to highlight the humanistic values inherent in science and its universalism, within the context of heightened French and European ambitions for technological and scientific sovereignty. Alice Recoque embodies these aspirations.
A true brand signature that carries the codes of French creativity—elegance and sobriety—this logo is composed of several elements. The blue sphere with the initials "AR" refers both to the atom or elementary particle and to the terrestrial globe. The star adorning this sphere symbolizes the compass, much like the one that guided sailors, and also embodies the "promise" of new discoveries. This connects with the figure of Alice Recoque, a pioneer of AI, as well as with the machine itself, which carries collective, scientific, societal, and therefore universal promises.
This universalism of science is reflected in the choice of colors, using the blue-white-red triptych for France and the blue of the European Union. The typography of the "E" letters, evoking server racks, demonstrates that the technological power of the Alice Recoque supercomputer is dedicated to this ideal. Beyond high-performance computing (HPC), hence "Beyond HPC." This tagline conveys the ambition assigned to Alice Recoque, as well as the plurality of technologies that will be mobilized: not only HPC, but also AI and quantum computing.
4. Focus on TGCC infrastructure
The Alice Recoque exascale supercomputer will be hosted and operated by CEA’s HPC division at TGCC[1], Très Grand Centre de calcul du CEA located in Bruyères-le-Châtel.
TGCC is an infrastructure dedicated to scientific high-performance computing and AI, built in 2010 to host very large supercomputers. TGCC currently hosts and operates several systems including Topaze, CEA’s supercomputer dedicated to industry, and Joliot-Curie GENCI’s supercomputer for academics.
To accommodate Alice Recoque, TGCC went a major upgrade over a period of 18 months while continuing to operate the hosted calculators. The electrical capacity was increased by 24 MW and a new dedicated 20 MW warm water loop was created, complementing the previous capacity of 12 MW electrical and 10 MW cold water loop. The main challenge was to reinforce the floor capacity to support next-generations of very high density racks (1.8 tons / m2 -> 2,8 tons/m2). To this end, CEA’s Infrastructure Division designed a forest of 67 steel pillars supporting the computer room floor from the basement, each pillar resting on 15 meter underground piles.
To discover TGCC : link to the video
TGCC rooms are now ready to welcome Alice Recoque. This preparation work will accelerate the system installation phase.
[1] the Very Large Computing Centre of CEA
[1] Preliminary specifications of the AMD Instinct™ MI430X GPU subject to change