Europe Launches JUPITER, Its First Exascale Supercomputer, to Drive Breakthroughs in Climate, Neuroscience, and AI Research

Europe’s first exascale supercomputer, JUPITER, has officially launched at the Forschungszentrum Jülich in Germany, marking a transformative milestone in scientific computing. The system, developed through a collaboration between the German research center and NVIDIA, is now operational and poised to drive breakthroughs across climate science, neuroscience, quantum research, and artificial intelligence. “JUPITER marks the culmination of more than a decade of research and development,” said Thomas Lippert, director of the Jülich Supercomputing Centre. “As the world’s most advanced and versatile exascale system, it represents a unique innovation, opening up completely new possibilities for science and industry in Europe.” JUPITER is powered by NVIDIA’s Grace Hopper Superchips and features the Quantum-2 InfiniBand networking architecture, creating a unified platform that seamlessly integrates high-performance computing (HPC) and AI workloads. “With JUPITER, Europe gains its most advanced AI supercomputer, built for large-scale simulation and AI, powered by NVIDIA Grace Hopper Superchips and Quantum-2 InfiniBand,” said Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA. “JUPITER fuses high-performance computing and AI into a single architecture. A platform for next-generation scientific computing, it will accelerate breakthroughs across every domain — from modeling climate and renewable energy to advancing quantum research, designing new materials and building digital twins.” The supercomputer’s inauguration was attended by top European officials, including German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, Federal Minister of Research, Technology and Space Dorothee Bär, Federal Minister for Digital and State Modernization Karsten Wildberger, North Rhine-Westphalia Minister-President Hendrik Wüst, and European Commission Commissioner Ekaterina Zaharieva. The event highlighted the system’s significance as a cornerstone of Europe’s digital and scientific infrastructure. JUPITER is housed in a modular data center at the Jülich campus and features advanced liquid cooling, with warm water circulating through the booster racks to maintain efficiency and reduce environmental impact. Its architecture enables extreme computational density and scalability, making it ideal for complex, data-intensive simulations. Initial flagship projects demonstrate the system’s broad impact: The Max Planck Institute of Biophysics will use JUPITER to simulate the nuclear pore complex—the largest protein assembly in human cells—at an atomic level, aiming to deepen understanding of nuclear transport and inform new treatments for retroviruses like HIV. The University of Edinburgh will leverage JUPITER to generate synthetic data for training multilingual large language models (LLMs), enabling AI systems to reason over long documents in any language. Additional LLM development is underway through the JUPITER Research and Early Access Program across Europe. The University of Wuppertal will run high-resolution simulations to study the magnetic moment of the muon, a fundamental particle, potentially uncovering new physics beyond the Standard Model. Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich will develop advanced spatio-temporal compression and diffusion models to create high-quality, accessible video AI systems, with applications in medical imaging and autonomous vehicles. The University of Lisbon will scale multimodal, multilingual foundation models that integrate machine learning, sparse modeling, information theory, and cognitive science, aiming to support all European languages and overcome limitations of current AI systems. With its unparalleled performance and open-access research framework, JUPITER is set to become a central hub for innovation across Europe. It not only strengthens the continent’s scientific competitiveness but also advances the development of AI and simulation tools essential for tackling global challenges.