The new JUPITER supercomputer, inaugurated by the European Commission and German Chancellor Merz at Forschungszentrum Jülich in Germany, is officially the first European system to achieve the exascale threshold.
The exascale threshold means it performs more than one quintillion (10¹8) operations per second, a computing power level comparable to aggregating the computing capabilities of one million modern smartphones.
Reaching this milestone means Europe has now entered the global league of high-performance computing. EC vice-president Henna Virkkunen hailed the achievement as a historic milestone. “With JUPITER, Europe becomes the home of the most powerful computer in Europe, and the fourth most powerful in the world. Just as the planet Jupiter has a gravitational pull that shapes our solar system, the JUPITER supercomputer will pull Europe’s research community, its start-ups, its industry, and its talent together.”
JUPITER combines unmatched performance with a strong focus on sustainability. The system runs entirely on renewable energy and features cutting-edge cooling and energy reuse, making it the world’s most energy-efficient supercomputer module, as confirmed by its number-one position on the Green500 ranking.
With computing power exceeding one exaflop, JUPITER will transform science, innovation, and policymaking across Europe. Researchers will now be able to run climate and weather models at kilometre-scale resolution, enabling much more precise forecasts of extreme events such as heatwaves, heavy storms, and floods.
JUPITER will support the development and deployment of AI solutions; its supercomputing capability will support the future AI Factory (JAIF) announced in March 2025, which will train cutting-edge large language models (LLMs) for generative AI and next-generation digital technologies.
JUPITER represents a €500 million joint investment by the EU and Germany channelled through the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking. It is part of Europe’s wider strategy to develop a network of AI Gigafactories: large-scale, energy-efficient computing hubs dedicated to training and deploying frontier AI models.
European High Performance Computing Joint Undertaking (EuroHPC)
