Bull Doubles Supercomputer Output in France

French state-owned supercomputer maker Bull reopened an expanded factory in Angers on October 1, doubling production capacity to support Europe's push to close the computing gap with the United States and China (Reuters, 2026).

Output has risen from six racks a month to twelve, and the plant can scale to twenty-four next year if demand continues. The expansion cost €80 million. Chief executive Emmanuel Le Roux said Bull has received more orders this year than ever before and has won fifteen of the eighteen tenders issued by EuroHPC, the EU body that co-funds Europe's supercomputer network, competing against Hewlett Packard Enterprise (Reuters, 2026).

France's order for a machine named after computer scientist Alice Recoque accounts for ninety-four racks and is being assembled alongside Finland's €388 million LUMI-AI system, Bull's biggest-ever contract. Airbus inaugurated Bull-built supercomputers in Toulouse and Hamburg this year, tripling its simulation capacity (Reuters, 2026). Cloud operator OVHcloud and European Commission-backed Domyn are both working to train frontier AI models on Bull's JUPITER machine, Europe's first exascale system, now running in Germany.

The European Union has committed €7 billion from 2021 through 2027 to a network of supercomputers. Bull's Angers plant is the only factory in Europe dedicated to building these machines. France completed its purchase of Bull from Atos on March 31, valuing the company at up to €404 million. The original motive was strategic. In the 1980s, after the United States stopped shipping supercomputers to France's nuclear agency, France turned to Bull to build the machines used for simulating nuclear tests (Reuters, 2026).

European-made components now account for seventy percent of the machines being built at Angers, up from twenty to thirty percent five years ago. Under a June partnership with Taiwan's Foxconn, Bull will also manufacture Nvidia's NVL systems at a plant in the Czech Republic, with final assembly in Angers (Reuters, 2026).