France launches Alice Recoque, its first exascale supercomputer, advancing AI, climate science, and Europe’s digital independence. A major leap in HPC.
France launches Alice Recoque, its first exascale supercomputer, advancing AI, climate science, and Europe’s digital independence. A major leap in HPC.
Paris, France: France has announced the launch of Alice Recoque, the country’s first-ever exascale supercomputer and a transformative step in Europe’s race to advance high-performance computing and artificial intelligence. Named after the pioneering French computer scientist Alice Recoque, the system is being developed to reach computational power previously unattainable within the European Union.
Expected to go operational in 2026, the supercomputer will be hosted at France’s national computing hub near Paris and will serve scientific institutions, industry researchers and public-sector innovation projects across the continent.
European officials describe Alice Recoque as a cornerstone of the region’s technology strategy, a push to reduce reliance on US and Asian chipmakers and cloud providers, and to secure computing sovereignty at a time when AI models and scientific simulations require massive energy-efficient infrastructure.
The system is designed to perform more than one quintillion calculations per second, a threshold known as exascale computing. Achieving this places France among a small group of countries capable of building machines at the highest level of global computational performance.
Alice Recoque is expected to support a wide range of transformative applications:
Researchers will be able to run next-generation climate simulations, enabling more precise forecasts for extreme weather, long-term environmental change, and disaster-response planning.
The machine will handle large-scale genomic analysis, drug-discovery simulations, and AI-driven medical models that require ultra-fast processing and vast memory capacity.
Scientists can model new materials at atomic detail, explore battery chemistry, and evaluate clean-energy technologies that demand high-resolution computational modelling.
Alice Recoque is also engineered for training and deploying advanced AI systems, from large language models to industrial digital twins with much higher energy efficiency than previous supercomputers.
The system features a hybrid architecture combining high-performance CPUs and GPUs with dense high-bandwidth memory designed specifically for AI and simulation workloads.
But one of its most significant innovations lies in energy efficiency.
The machine uses direct liquid cooling and warm-water circulation to maintain stable operation while reducing electricity consumption. Engineers estimate that Alice Recoque will use dramatically less power per teraflop than earlier European supercomputers, a critical improvement as AI-driven systems become increasingly energy-intensive.
With global competition intensifying in AI and high-performance computing, European governments argue that building domestic exascale capacity is critical. Alice Recoque is part of a broader European initiative to ensure that strategic scientific data, large-scale AI training, and sensitive research can be processed on EU-controlled infrastructure.
The project also reinforces Europe’s positioning in semiconductor and advanced computing technologies, providing a platform that universities, startups and public agencies can rely on for innovation without leaving the continent.
The machine’s name pays tribute to Alice Recoque, a trailblazer of French computing best known for her contributions to early AI research and mainframe development in the 1960s and 1970s. Her work laid key foundations for France’s modern computing sector, making her legacy fitting for the country’s most advanced computing system to date.
Installation and final assembly will continue into 2026, with scientists expecting the first research workloads to begin shortly after full validation. Once online, Alice Recoque will rank among the world’s most powerful machines and is expected to dramatically expand Europe’s ability to compete in the global AI and scientific research landscape.
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