TLDR: Europe has officially entered the exascale supercomputing era with the inauguration of ‘JUPITER’ at Forschungszentrum Jülich, Germany. This groundbreaking system, capable of over one quintillion operations per second, is Europe’s fastest and the world’s fourth fastest supercomputer. JUPITER is a €500 million joint investment by the EU and Germany, designed to drive advancements in scientific research, climate modeling, and crucially, artificial intelligence development, including the training of large language models and supporting a network of AI Gigafactories across the continent. It also stands out for its exceptional energy efficiency, running entirely on renewable energy and ranking first on the Green500 list.
Europe has marked a significant technological milestone with the official inauguration of ‘JUPITER’ (Joint Undertaking Pioneer for Innovative and Transformative Exascale Research), its first exascale supercomputer. The grand ceremony took place on September 5, 2025, at Forschungszentrum Jülich in Germany, attended by high-ranking officials including German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, Minister-President of North Rhine-Westphalia Hendrik Wüst, and EU Commissioner Ekaterina Zaharieva (also referred to as Henna Virkkunen, Executive Vice-President of the European Commission for Technological Sovereignty, Security, and Democracy in some reports) .
JUPITER has officially become the first European system to achieve the exascale threshold, performing more than one quintillion (10¹⁸) operations per second. This immense computing power is comparable to the aggregated capabilities of one million modern smartphones . It is officially ranked as Europe’s most powerful supercomputer and the fourth fastest worldwide . For AI applications, JUPITER’s performance even exceeds 40 ExaFLOP/s, positioning it among the world’s most powerful systems for artificial intelligence .
Chancellor Friedrich Merz hailed JUPITER as a ‘technological and scientific breakthrough’ and a ‘milestone on Germany’s path to becoming an AI-nation.’ He emphasized that ‘Our security and competitiveness in Germany and Europe depend on technological sovereignty and sovereign computing capacities’ . Minister-President Hendrik Wüst highlighted the supercomputer’s role in the structural transformation of the Rhineland mining region, marking a ‘transition from coal to AI’ and aiming to make North Rhine-Westphalia an ‘AI hotspot in Europe’ . EU Commissioner Henna Virkkunen described it as a ‘historic milestone,’ demonstrating that ‘when we combine national vision with European cooperation, we can achieve global excellence’ .
A key focus of JUPITER is its exceptional sustainability. The system runs entirely on renewable energy and features a cutting-edge warm-water cooling system that reuses the generated heat to warm buildings on the Jülich campus . This makes it the world’s most energy-efficient supercomputer module, securing its number one position on the Green500 ranking . Prof. Astrid Lambrecht, Chair of the Board of Directors at Forschungszentrum Jülich, stated, ‘At a time when digitalization and AI are requiring more and more energy, with JUPITER, we show the path toward resource-efficient computing’ .
JUPITER is set to revolutionize various fields of science, innovation, and policymaking across Europe. Researchers will be able to run climate and weather models at kilometer-scale resolution, enabling more precise forecasts of extreme events like heatwaves, heavy storms, and floods . It will also accelerate drug development, materials research, and the study of complex biological systems such as proteins, cells, and the brain . Prof. Thomas Lippert, director of the Jülich Supercomputing Centre, noted, ‘JUPITER changes the framework conditions for scientific research fundamentally. Models, which were previously computationally inaccessible, now become reality’ .
Crucially, JUPITER will be a cornerstone for the development and deployment of AI solutions. It will support the future JUPITER AI Factory (JAIF), announced in March 2025, which will serve as a training platform for cutting-edge large language models (LLMs) for generative AI and next-generation digital technologies . This initiative is part of Europe’s broader strategy to develop a network of AI Gigafactories – large-scale, energy-efficient computing hubs dedicated to training and deploying frontier AI models . Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA, whose Grace Hopper Superchips power the JUPITER Booster, emphasized that ‘JUPITER fuses high-performance computing and AI into a single architecture,’ accelerating breakthroughs across every domain .
The project represents a substantial €500 million joint investment, with funding provided by the European High Performance Computing Joint Undertaking (EuroHPC JU), the Federal Ministry for Research, Technology and Space (BMFTR), and the Ministry of Culture and Science of the State of North Rhine-Westphalia (MKW NRW) via the Gauss Centre for Supercomputing (GCS) . The construction of JUPITER was completed in less than two years, housed in a purpose-built modular data center . More than 100 national and international projects are already utilizing the supercomputer .
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Anders Jensen, EuroHPC JU Executive Director, declared, ‘With JUPITER, Europe is entering the exascale era, unlocking unprecedented computing power to drive scientific discovery, industrial innovation, and technological sovereignty’ . Emmanuel Le Roux, SVP, Global head of Advanced Computing and AI at Eviden (Atos Group), a technology partner, called it ‘proof of what Europe can achieve when public organizations and industry leaders unite around a shared vision’ .
