Europe's high-performance computing sector received a significant boost today as the Jupiter supercomputer was officially powered on at the Jülich Supercomputing Center. The modular exascale system delivers a peak of nearly one ExaFLOP (930 PetaFLOPS) of FP64 performance and debuts as the fastest machine in Europe, positioned at number four on the Top500 list. Built around NVIDIA Grace Hopper technology, the booster contributes approximately 793 PetaFLOPs of FP64, while each compute node features four GH200 accelerators, resulting in a fleet of 23,752 accelerators across 5,938 nodes, all mounted in 125 server racks. Those GH200-class accelerators are noted for their strong energy efficiency, with published figures of nearly 60.5 GigaFLOPS per watt, and an accelerator farm drawing on the order of double-digit megawatts of power. Jupiter is primarily designed for AI workloads. Hence, it delivers over 90 ExaFLOPS in AI's favorite FP8 format.

Reported build costs are estimated to be near €500 million, and European planners anticipate a multibillion-euro expansion will be required to close capacity gaps, with figures of around €60 billion cited for deployments through 2030. Planners envision roughly 13 specialized AI data centers and gigafactory-scale facilities, with Jülich a candidate for expansion. Backers say this is about digital sovereignty, keeping critical infrastructure close to European research and industry rather than depending on foreign cloud providers. Operationally, Jupiter will support climate modelling, materials simulation and biological research, complemented by an inference module, Jarvis, for fast model serving. For Europe, Jupiter is meant to be both a capability and a signal: an energy-conscious exascale platform designed to anchor AI work and catalyze further regional investment.