Europe has officially entered the exascale era with the inauguration of Jupiter, its most powerful supercomputer, on September 5, 2025. Located at the Jülich Supercomputing Centre in Germany, Jupiter has secured the fourth position globally in supercomputing power and leads the Green500 list for energy efficiency. This technological marvel is equipped with 24,000 Nvidia GH200 Grace Hopper superchips, each featuring a 72-core CPU and a GPU. This configuration enables Jupiter to achieve speeds of up to 90 exaflops for artificial intelligence tasks and approximately 930 petaflops for traditional computations. Such power allows for unparalleled precision in simulating complex global phenomena, including climate patterns.
The official launch ceremony was attended by prominent European leaders, including German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, who described Jupiter as "Europe's fastest computer and a pioneering project for the continent." He highlighted its potential to significantly accelerate progress in critical fields such as artificial intelligence, climatology, astrophysics, and quantum computing. Jupiter's design prioritizes energy efficiency, utilizing a reusable liquid cooling system that consumes energy comparable to that of 11,000 homes. The waste heat generated is repurposed to warm buildings within the supercomputing center's campus, demonstrating a commitment to sustainable operations.
With a modular architecture spread across seven rooms and housing 125 superchip racks, Jupiter is engineered for progressive scalability, aiming to rival leading US supercomputers like Frontier and El Capitan. Its extensive memory capacity, reaching hundreds of terabytes of HBM3e per chip, and storage approaching an exabyte, are designed to support large-scale, complex projects. The supercomputer's foundation is the BullSequana XH3000 architecture from Eviden, which facilitates seamless memory sharing between CPUs and GPUs without data copying, thereby enhancing calculation speed and efficiency. Each chip can manage up to 624 GB of memory, and NVL2 modules enable two superchips to collaborate on generative AI and language models.
The EuroHPC Joint Undertaking, a collaboration between the EU, European countries, and private partners, has invested approximately €500 million in Jupiter, underscoring a unified European strategy for advancing high-performance computing and AI capabilities. This initiative aligns with Europe's broader ambition to establish AI gigafactories, creating energy-efficient hubs for developing frontier AI systems. Jupiter's role in this ecosystem is pivotal, serving as a powerful engine for training advanced large language models and fostering the growth of Europe's AI sector. The Nvidia GH200 Grace Hopper Superchip, powering Jupiter, is a groundbreaking processor designed for massive-scale AI and high-performance computing, offering up to a tenfold increase in performance for applications handling terabytes of data. Jupiter's impact extends to scientific research, where its exascale power will revolutionize fields like climate modeling, enabling highly detailed climate analyses and weather simulations at kilometer-scale resolution for more accurate forecasts of extreme weather events. Furthermore, Jupiter's capabilities will drive breakthroughs in physics, medicine, and materials science.