The European Union got involved in the race for a supercomputer

Bloomberg, citing the European Commission, said that after China announced the creation and launch of a supercomputer in 2020, the European Union is ready to allocate 1 billion euros for a similar project.

The European Union got involved in the race for a supercomputer

Europe, not owning its own capacities for the manufacture of electronics and processors, aimed to catch up with the United States and China in the construction of a supercomputer. The European Commission hopes that in 2020 the European Union will take over such supercomputers.

The project to create a computer with a capacity of 100 quadrillion calculations per second was put on the commission's table back in March 2017. However, funding was agreed only after China announced the creation of a supercomputer. The European Union is ready to allocate half a billion euros from its own budget, and hopes that the second half will be contributed by the participating countries that wish to get access to the supercomputer at the end of the project. So far, 13 states have agreed to participate in financing, which intend to equally share the costs of the project.

According to experts, to create a supercomputer, the EU will need electronics, which are manufactured only in the United States or China. It’s not a fact that Europe-friendly countries will agree to share resources, because it’s more profitable for Americans and Chinese to sell the finished product than to see a competitor on the market in the future.