Germany’s Merz inaugurates Nvidia supercomputer for research

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BERLIN (Reuters) -German Chancellor Friedrich Merz inaugurated a supercomputer powered by Nvidia chips on Friday that is the world’s fourth-fastest, saying it helps Europe catch up with the leaders in AI, the United States and China.

“We are today witnessing a historic European pioneering project,” Merz said at the Juelich research centre in western Germany, the site of the installation of the Jupiter supercomputer, which was also assembled by French IT group Atos and German modular supercomputing company ParTec.

He said the U.S. and China were leading the race towards an AI-driven economy, but “we in Germany and in Europe have all the opportunities to catch up and then to hold our own”.

The start of Jupiter’s operations marks the first European supercomputer of the Exascale class, mastering one billion times one billion calculations per second, also making it the region’s fastest.

That amounts to the power of about 10 million standard notebook computers.

European institutions are aiming to stay competitive against the U.S. in supercomputers, used in scientific fields from biotechnology to climate research, seeking to avoid over-reliance on digital services from overseas.

Jupiter “will put Germany at the forefront of global high-performance computing and improve the conditions for the development of AI,” said Ralf Wintergerst, head of digital business association Bitkom, adding that access to it should be made as unbureaucratic as possible for start-ups and established companies.

(Reporting by Andreas Rinke; Writing by Friederike Heine and Ludwig Burger; Editing by Alex Richardson)