NEWS

Today, the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking (EuroHPC JU) selected a consortium led by the Forschungszentrum Jülich (FZJ) to host one of Europe’s newest AI Factories. The JUPITER AI Factory (JAIF) consortium consists of the Jülich Supercomputing Centre (JSC), the Center for Artificial Intelligence at RWTH Aachen University, the Fraunhofer Institutes for Applied Information Technology and for Intelligent and Information Systems, and the Hessian Center for Artificial Intelligence. 

The EuroHPC’s AI Factory initiative is bringing together leading European computational resources, expertise, and data to promote and leverage AI technologies in healthcare, manufacturing, climate science, and finance, among other key research areas. In late 2024, the EuroHPC JU announced the formation of seven initial AI Factories. Today's announcement added 6 new AI Factories, bringing the total to 13 across Europe. 

JAIF will support the European research community in integrating AI techniques into existing or emerging applications. The consortium is putting special emphasis on the EuroHPC JU’s key strategic application areas and will support co-design of new AI applications. The foundational piece of technology for JAIF is JSC’s upcoming JUPITER supercomputer. Set to go online in mid-2025, JUPITER will be Europe’s first exascale supercomputer and one of the most powerful machines in the world for AI training applications. The consortium also plans to provide world-class user support and training for AI applications, envisioning itself as a crucial link between AI experts, supercomputing providers, and users from both academia and private industry. 

JAIF is funded with €55 million in contributions from the EuroHPC JU, the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF), the Ministry of Culture and Science of the state of North Rhine-Westphalia, and the Hessian Ministry of Science and Research, Arts and Culture.

JAIF complements HammerHAI as second German AI Factory

Within Germany’s high-performance computing landscape, the Gauss Centre for Supercomputing (GCS), the alliance of Germany’s three national supercomputing centers — the High-Performance Computing Center Stuttgart (HLRS), the Jülich Supercomputing Centre (JSC), and the Leibniz Supercomputing Centre (LRZ) — is pursuing a coordinated approach to support Europe’s AI needs. The announcement of JAIF marks the next step in GCS’s efforts to provide optimized supercomputing resources for different user communities. This strategy affects both the hardware configuration and the services offered. 

Motivated by the strengths of the JAIF consortium and capabilities of JUPITER, JAIF will focus on supporting the key sectors of healthcare, energy, climate change/environment, education/media/culture, public sector and finance/insurance.

JAIF will support these domains on all scales, from prototype applications to extreme upscaling, and will provide extreme scaling while providing the AI infrastructure needed by startups, SMEs, industry and academia.

The selection of JAIF comes on the heels of the announcement of the HammerHAI consortium in December 2024. Led by HLRS, HammerHAI also includes contributions from LRZ, the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, SICOS BW, and the Gesellschaft für wissenschaftliche Datenverarbeitung Göttingen. HammerHAI is building on HLRS’s established focus on industry, engineering, and global challenges. The Stuttgart-based AI factory is tailored to the needs of manufacturing, automotive and mobility, start-ups, SMEs across all sectors.

HammerHAI is funded with €85 million, with contributions coming from the EuroHPC JU, the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research, the Baden-Württemberg Ministry of Science, Research, and Art, the Bavarian Ministry of Science and the Arts, and the Lower Saxony Ministry for Science and Culture. 

Please read the full press release from BMBF.

For more information about JAIF, please read the full press release on the FZJ website.  

For more information about HammerHAI, please read the full press release on the HLRS website.