The European High-Performance Computing Joint Undertaking (EuroHPC JU) signed a €387.8 million procurement contract on August 31 to build LUMI-AI, a next-generation AI supercomputer at CSC’s Kajaani data center in Finland.
The system will be powered by AMD Instinct MI430X GPUs and 6th-generation EPYC 256-core CPUs, delivering approximately ten times the AI capacity and twice the HPC throughput of the current LUMI supercomputer. Deployment is scheduled for the second half of 2027.
AMD Gains Ground in European AI Infrastructure
The contract represents a significant win for AMD in the European AI infrastructure market, historically dominated by NVIDIA. The MI430X GPUs are part of AMD’sInstinct family designed for large-scale AI training and inference workloads.
Funding is split evenly between EuroHPC and the LUMI AI Factory consortium, which includes Finland, Belgium, Czechia, Denmark, Norway, Poland, Sweden, and Switzerland. The project also includes an environmental twist: waste heat from the data center will be recycled into Kajaani’s district heating network.
European Sovereign AI Capacity
LUMI-AI underscores Europe’s push for sovereign AI compute capacity amid growing US dominance in advanced AI chips. The EuroHPC JU has been steadily awarding contracts for AI-capable supercomputers across the continent, with systems planned in Germany, Italy, and Spain.
The timing is notable as the US tightens export controls on advanced AI chips to China, making domestic European capacity strategically more important. LUMI-AI will be available to researchers and industry across the EU through open access proposals.
Source: EuroHPC JU, AMD