Canada to join EU supercomputer network — Politico Europe

In Brussels, Belgium, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said that Canada will join the European EuroHPC supercomputer network. This will give Canadian industry, startups and researchers access to European supercomputers, which are used, among other things, to train artificial intelligence models.

Politico Europe reported the decision on October 29. Von der Leyen said that combining Europe’s computing capacity with Canada’s advanced AI industry would make it possible to create competitive, innovative and secure artificial intelligence systems.

Capabilities of the EuroHPC network

The European network is managed by the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking, an EU public-private structure with a budget of €8.2 billion. The network includes 14 supercomputers, some of which are among the world’s ten most powerful, 19 AI-focused factories and 10 quantum computers.

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EuroHPC is also to manage seven large AI data centers known as AI gigafactories. They are planned to be built next year, with total investment amounting to €30 billion.

Cooperation in AI

Anton Leicht, an expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, called cooperation in computing capacity one of the most obvious short-term areas of interaction among middle-power states in AI. At the same time, he noted that such cooperation does not yet reduce dependence on the United States, which is building gigawatt-scale clusters.

Canada’s participation in the network builds on its previous partial involvement in the Horizon Europe research and innovation program, which partly funds EuroHPC. At the time of publication, 38 countries participated in the network: 27 EU member states and a number of countries outside the bloc, including Norway, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, Israel and Turkey.