Europe has joined the exascale elite with its most powerful supercomputer to date, and the fourth fastest on the planet.

Capable of performing more than one quintillion (10¹⁸) operations per second, a power level comparable to one million smartphones, the bloc’s JUPITER supercomputer has officially become the first European system to achieve the exascale threshold.

According to the European Commission, the JUPITER exascale machine combines this colossal performance with a strong focus on sustainability, with the system running entirely on renewable energy and featuring cutting-edge cooling and energy reuse.

Based in Germany and developed by the Jülich Supercomputing Centre, the supercomputer is among the world’s most energy-efficient modules, as evident by its Green500 ranking last year.

With computing power exceeding one exaflop, policymakers across Europe hope that JUPITER could boost the continent’s science and innovation, particularly in areas of growing concern like climate change. 

For example, with the system, researchers will be able to run weather models at kilometre‑scale resolution, enabling much more precise forecasts of extreme events such as heatwaves, heavy storms, and floods.

The JUPITER project, which represents a €500 million (£433.5m) joint investment by the EU and Germany, also forms 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.

The EU has already selected sites for thirteen of these AI Factories scattered across Europe, including in Austria, Bulgaria, France, Germany and Poland, with plans to bring together computing power, data, and talent that start-ups and industry need to develop next-gen digital technologies.

“With Europe’s first exascale supercomputer, we are opening a new chapter for science, AI and innovation,” said Ekaterina Zaharieva, EU Commissioner for startups, research and innovation.

“JUPITER strengthens Europe’s digital sovereignty, accelerates discovery, and ensures that the most powerful and sustainable computing resources are available to our researchers, innovators, and industries.”

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The supercomputer is a big step forward for the EU in its ambition to achieve tech sovereignty, a desire born of the fact that the bloc relies on non-EU countries for over 80% of digital products, services, infrastructure and IP, and turbo-charged with the election of Donald Trump to the White House.

In a report from July, the European Parliament said that building technological sovereignty and international competitiveness would ‘greatly depend on Europe’s ability to create the market conditions needed for European companies to flourish and compete with each other’, with the JUPITER module a core strand of the plan to get there.

Likewise, the UK is also planning to ramp up its compute power. In June, the UK Government U-turned on its funding of an exascale machine based at the University of Edinburgh, with plans to invest £750 million to create the UK’s most powerful supercomputer, while Bristol will play host to another new AI supercomputer, named Isambard-AI.