Europe Builds €387.8 Million LUMI-AI Supercomputer, Poland Joins Funding Consortium

The European supercomputing consortium EuroHPC has announced the contractor for its sixth AI factory under the EU's AI Factories program. The €387.8 million contract to build the LUMI-AI supercomputer went to French company Bull, with the machine set to be installed in Finland alongside the existing LUMI system. Poland is among the six countries funding the project.

LUMI-AI is the sixth consecutive contract signed under the AI Factories program, an EU initiative building computing infrastructure dedicated to training and running artificial intelligence models. The new machine will be installed at the data center in Kajaani, Finland, home to the original LUMI supercomputer, one of the most powerful computing systems in Europe.

Who is paying, and for what

Construction will be funded equally by the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking and a consortium of six partner countries. This is the model already used for earlier AI factories: part of the cost comes from the EU budget, part from the participating countries, in exchange for preferential access to the machine's computing power for researchers, startups and companies from those countries.

The contractor is Bull, a French technology company that has itself recently undergone a transformation. The firm was spun off from the Atos group for up to €404 million, and the LUMI-AI contract is described as the largest in its history to date. Bull will deliver a machine built on AMD processors, with IBM storage and Nokia networking infrastructure.

Poland's role

Poland will not host LUMI-AI, but it belongs to the six-country consortium co-funding the construction and using its resources, alongside Finland, Czechia, Denmark, Estonia and Norway. Poland's participation is handled by the Cyfronet AGH Academic Computer Centre (Akademickie Centrum Komputerowe Cyfronet AGH) in Kraków, which operates as part of the PLGrid infrastructure and runs the national LAIF support center for LUMI-AI users.

Cyfronet will provide Polish researchers, startups and small companies with access to LUMI-AI's computing resources, expert consultations and training in AI model training. This is a separate project from the previously announced Polish AI factory Gaia, which Cyfronet also runs under the EuroHPC program, and from the planned AI gigafactory in Poznań, funded from a separate EU pool.

The goal of the AI Factories program

AI Factories is an EU program launched in 2023 aimed at narrowing Europe's computing gap with the United States and China in artificial intelligence. So far, EuroHPC has selected 19 AI factory locations across more than a dozen member states, combining existing supercomputers with new hardware optimized for training and running AI models. EuroHPC's total budget for 2021-2027 stands at €8.2 billion.

LUMI-AI is set to be one of the most advanced systems of its kind in Europe, capable of both training large language models and running complex scientific computations, such as climate simulations or materials research. It is scheduled to launch in the second half of 2027.

What it means for Polish companies

For Polish research teams and AI startups, this means another channel of access to computing power, which remains scarce in the European market, alongside the domestic Athena supercomputer in Kraków and the planned AI gigafactory in Poznań. Access to LUMI-AI could be especially valuable for teams working on larger models, where domestic infrastructure falls short.

Poland has spent months pushing for a bigger role in EU computing programs for AI, while separately pursuing its own billion-euro AI gigafactory in Poznań. Joining the LUMI-AI consortium is a smaller but concrete step in the same direction, providing access to ready-made infrastructure without having to build one from scratch.