Bull builds Europe's supercomputers at home, then pays Samsung, SK Hynix and Micron for the memory
Bull's chief executive says Europe now sources 70% of its supercomputers' parts locally, but memory, over 90% of it made by Samsung, SK Hynix and Micron, has no European supplier at all. Samsung's $231m bet on Europe's inference-chip camp went to Euclyd, not Vsora, on every record that names a company.
Vincent Jiang · 3 min read
Bull, the French state-owned maker of Europe's fastest machines, reopened an expanded Angers factory on Friday, and its chief executive used the moment to name the one part Europe still cannot make. "The problem is memory. We don't see anything coming," Emmanuel Le Roux said on the plant floor 1.
Bull now sources about 70% of the components in its machines in Europe, up from 20-30% five years ago, and Le Roux pointed to SiPearl, in which Bull holds a stake, plus Vsora and Openchip as progress on processors 1. Processors, he noted, are just 10-20% of a supercomputer's value 1.
Fifteen of eighteen EuroHPC tenders run through Angers
The €80m rebuild doubled output to 12 racks a month from six, with 24 possible in 2027, at what Bull calls the only site in Europe assembling supercomputers at scale 2. Le Roux says orders this year top any before, and Bull has won 15 of 18 EuroHPC tenders, beating Hewlett Packard Enterprise 23.
Angers is building France's 94-rack Alice Recoque and Finland's €388m LUMI-AI, the largest contract in Bull's history, side by side 2. Paris became Bull's sole shareholder on 31 March, paying Atos up to €404m 2.
Bull doubled Angers output and could double it again in 2027
- Estimate
Data
| Value | |
|---|---|
| Before rebuild | 6 racks/mo |
| After rebuild, 2026 | 12 racks/mo |
| Capacity ceiling, 2027 (estimate) | 24 racks/mo |
The gap the money cannot close
Samsung, SK Hynix and Micron produce more than 90% of the world's memory, prices have jumped into the sector's top concerns, and memory has no European supplier at all 1. Europe's public money is landing on processors, the 10-to-20-percent slice, while the memory bill flows to the trio that sets it 1. Angers will even assemble Nvidia Vera Rubin NVL72 servers under a Foxconn deal: Europe the contract manufacturer, the design and the memory both imported 2.
The local hope Le Roux named
Vsora is the challenger Le Roux named. Its Jotunn8 carries 288GB of HBM3E and 3.2 petaflops on TSMC CoWoS packaging, and CEO Khaled Maalej calls Vsora "probably the only company in Europe having access to HBM3E today" 45. That access is granted by TSMC and the HBM vendors themselves 4.
A funding round of undisclosed size was confirmed on 25 September, and former Altera chief Sandra Rivera, once head of Intel's data center and AI group, has chaired the board since January 46. On 3 October, a wire item paired Samsung with a $231m round for an unnamed European Nvidia rival 7.
The $231m went to Euclyd
The figure is real but belongs to Euclyd, a two-year-old Eindhoven firm building inference silicon and its own memory architecture, whose Series A Samsung co-led 8. Former ASML chief Peter Wennink joins as its chairman, and Euclyd CEO Bernardo Kastrup says Samsung's value runs through its memory manufacturing 8. Nothing in the fetched record ties Samsung to Vsora.
HBM3E allocation is the test for Europe's chip bets
Memory is the line item most likely to inflate the €388m LUMI-AI and €554m Alice Recoque bills, with Le Roux already ranking its price among the sector's top concerns 12. Whether HBM3E allocation shows up in Vsora's next-generation chip, promised this year, is the test 4. Until one moves, marks on European sovereign-chip paper are claims on inputs the founders do not control 8.
Deepdive
AI-generated from this story and its cited sources. Not investment advice.
