Europe wants AI to stop being just a promise and start becoming infrastructure. In this race, Barcelona is once again playing a leading role: the European High Performance Computing Joint Undertaking (EuroHPC JU) has signed the purchase agreement to expand the AI capabilities of MareNostrum 5, the supercomputer hosted and operated by the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC).
The agreement is part of the BSC AI Factory initiative, one of the “AI factories” promoted by EuroHPC to help European SMEs and startups work with AI-ready data, access optimized supercomputing resources, training, and technical support across sectors ranging from health and climate to finance, legal, energy, media, and public administration.
A €129 million contract to leap forward in AI workloads
The operation involves large-scale European funding: a total budget of €129,000,000 for the acquisition, delivery, installation, and maintenance of the system, with 50% financed by EuroHPC JU (via the Digital Europe program) and the remaining 50% supplied by Spain, Portugal, and Turkey as part of the BSC AI Factory consortium.
According to EuroHPC, the selected consortium is led by FSAS Technologies and Telefónica, chosen after a bidding process launched in July 2025.
What does this mean in practice?
EuroHPC’s message is clear: the expansion aims to transform MareNostrum 5 into a more “AI-first” platform, with capabilities designed for demanding workloads. Features mentioned include next-generation GPUs, hardware accelerated for deep learning and natural language processing, high-speed interconnects, increased storage capacity, and more efficient cooling technologies to sustain intensive research more sustainably.
At the same time, the corporate announcement about the project points to a design focused on separating “core” and “service”: two new compute partitions, one dedicated to training large language models (LLMs) and another for inference. Additional improvements include high-performance file systems tailored for AI and specialized software packages.
Timeline: start in 2026 and deployment at BSC facilities
EuroHPC indicates that the installation of the expanded system will begin in early 2026. The project documentation also states that deployment will rely on two interconnected BSC facilities and will incorporate technologies from vendors such as Supermicro, IBM, VAST, and NVIDIA (according to the announcement).
Why does this matter? It’s not just “more power,” it’s access and competitiveness
The strategic significance goes beyond technological pride. The declared goal is to strengthen Europe’s capacity to innovate and compete with AI, with a very practical focus: enabling small companies (and administrations) to test, train, and deploy without the barriers of inaccessible advanced computing.
Moreover, EuroHPC emphasizes that although the system is “primarily designed” for startups and SMEs, it will also be accessible to the research community, with resources allocated jointly by EuroHPC JU and the BSC AI Factory consortium, aligning with their investments.
via: bsc.es