The European Union has entered the race for a supercomputer

According to Bloomberg, citing the European Commission, after China’s announcement of creating and launching a supercomputer in 2020, the European Union is prepared to allocate 1 billion euros for a similar project.

The European Union has entered the race for a supercomputer

Europe, lacking its own capacities for manufacturing electronics and processors, aims to catch up with the USA and China in supercomputer construction. The European Commission hopes that by 2020, the union of European countries will possess such supercomputers.

The project to create a computer with a capacity of 100 quadrillion calculations per second was proposed to the commission back in March 2017. However, funding was only approved after China’s announcement of creating a supercomputer. The EU is ready to allocate half a billion euros from its own budget and hopes that the participating countries will contribute the other half, aiming to gain access to the supercomputer upon project completion. So far, 13 countries have agreed to participate in funding, intending to share the project costs equally.

According to experts, creating a supercomputer will require electronics that are only manufactured in the USA or China. It is uncertain whether friendly European countries will share resources, as it is more profitable for Americans and Chinese to sell the finished product rather than see a competitor on the market in the future.