5d ago

Jupiter - first european AI supercomputer with over 24k NVIDIA chips now live

blogs.nvidia.com

Now Live: Europe’s First Exascale Supercomputer, JUPITER, Accelerates Climate Research, Neuroscience, Quantum Simulation

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with over 24k NVIDIA chips
So we celebrate this in "Buy European" that we made Nvidia rich ;-)
- To be fair: what else? Spend billions to become a European competitor to nvidia first and THEN build this "super"computer?
  Not that this wouldn't be way better, but it's just not gonna happen soon.
  
  Maybe NOT celebrate it in buy European?
  
  I just found the irony remarkable.
  We have all the technology in Europe. We know how to make the chips AND the chip factories etc. Just nobody wants to do it here, so we deliver the tech to elsewhere.
  
  If EU want to become relevant in future industry then it'll have to do decades of catching up, yes.
  One way to kickstart it is to have military only procure EU produced chips. It'll be redonkulously expensive, but it's also a necessity for domestic security.
  This announcement is like putting lipstick on a pig, instead.
- The EU has nothing to compete with chips wise, so in order to prevent America from running away with AI you have to use what they use as well
  To be fair China doesn't have anything either but it is trying:
  DeepSeek’s next AI model delayed by attempt to use Chinese chips
  https://www.ft.com/content/eb984646-6320-4bfe-a78d-a1da2274b092
  Maybe if the EU can compete with AI it can use that extra productivity to help produce chips? but it would likely require a federal EU and a willingness to dump 10's of billions of dollars into the project same as space flight
- But they're now located in Jülich. Next to some heavily guarded nuclear waste.
Before everyone hops on the AI hate train, it's worth noting that this is an advancement in the sorts of machine learning capabilities that we used to be very excited about before AI slop and LLM psychosis turned everyone against it. Climate modelling, drug discovery, brain mapping and quantum simulation are all examples of good AI.
- When I studied the subject the course was called "algorithmic pattern recognition". I prefer that name as it's quite neutrally describes what's going on.
  AI is just a stupid advertisement term that backfired. I hate how the term even made it to law.
  But it's convenient for them: in the EU the legal description of "AI" even includes digital thermostats. By introducing new "AI" laws, they extend their power over all digital technologies, and people nod along thinking it's about language models.
  And large tech is happy too, as the barrier to entry is now way larger due to the legal red tape. A barrier they can just pay their way through, but hurts others. It snuffed out European rivals and competition that didn't even exist yet, cementing their lead, if it wasn't for asia.
Oh. Joy. /s
Makes you wonder what sort of microcode backdoors and malware Nvidia was forced by the trump administration to put in.
Ofcourse we would all rather see it using EU chips but the hard reality is that they don't exist.
So the tradeoff becomes can this thing produce more value for the EU using NVIDIA chips now instead of using EU chips someday on a hypothetical future date?
And the awnser is probably yes.

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