Europe is shifting from policy deliberations regarding the local production of AI computing systems to its actual production. French state-controlled company Bull has increased the capacity of its Angers plant in France, thereby doubling the volume of supercomputers produced in response to the rising demand for computing capability in Europe.Six racks a month, now twelve, with headroom for 24According to reports from Reuters, Bull spent €80 million on the Angers facility. Output has gone up to 12 racks a month, with the possibility of producing up to 24 racks if demand continues to increase.According to CEO Emmanuel Le Roux, Bull has been able to complete more orders in 2026 than in any other year. France finalised its takeover of the company from Atos on March 31 at a price of €404 million. The company has about 3,000 employees and is expected to hire 500 more by the end of the year, according to HPCwire.Winning 15 of 18 EuroHPC tendersAccording to Le Roux, Bull has taken 15 out of the 18 EuroHPC bids till date. The firm has outperformed many competitors, including Hewlett Packard Enterprise, thus ensuring a significant share of Europe’s publicly financed supercomputing contracts goes into the hand of a European manufacturer.Additionally, Airbus has activated Bull-built systems in Toulouse and Hamburg. The five-year deal is worth nearly €100 million and has tripled the planemaker’s simulation capacity.On top of that, Bull is behind JUPITER, the first operational exascale supercomputer in Europe. OVHcloud and European Commission-backed Domyn are using the system to test frontier-class AI models.Alice Recoque and LUMI-AI, assembled side by sideThe new Angers factory will now enable Bull to assemble France’s 94-rack Alice Recoque system along with LUMI-AI from Finland, which the old factory could not accomplish.Bull’s largest contract so far, LUMI-AI is worth €387.8 million. The machine will run AMD Instinct MI430X GPUs and sixth-generation AMD EPYC processors at CSC’s Kajaani data center.Bull Supercomputer Expansion: Europe’s AI Compute Buildout in NumbersEurope’s compute gap and the gigafactory betThe initiative conforms to a larger goal to minimize Europe’s reliance on computing power from outside the continent. The European Union has allocated €7 billion during the 2021-2027 period, which will be used to establish its supercomputer network.Currently, EuroHPC is managing 19 AI factories and 13 antennas, and it is currently starting the Gigafactory project, which is expected to bring in roughly €30 billion, as per Cryptopolitan’s previous report.The sector around that buildout is growing rapidly. According to Fortune Business Insights, the size of the global HPC market is estimated to be $64.67 billion in 2026, while the forecast for 2034 is $128.84 billion.McKinsey forecasts that global data-center expenses will surpass $7 trillion by 2030, and PwC predicts total capital expenditure amounting to $31.60 trillion until 2050.Still built on foreign chipsEurope is gaining more control over the systems themselves, but the most advanced processors still come from abroad. Reuters says European-made components now account for about 70% of Bull’s machines, up from 20%–30% five years ago.Bull is also developing its BXI interconnect to reduce reliance on Nvidia’s Mellanox networking, but its highest-end systems still depend heavily on US-designed GPUs and CPUs. That leaves Europe in an in-between position: it is becoming better able to build and operate its own AI infrastructure, even as the chips powering that infrastructure remain largely foreign.For Bull, the Angers expansion shows how quickly that balance is shifting. Europe may not control the entire AI hardware stack yet, but it is investing heavily in the part it can build at home—and trying to make that footprint large enough to matter.Don’t just read crypto news. Understand it. Subscribe to our newsletter. It's free.