Recently, the French government designated an upgrade for the Jean Zay supercomputer, which has quadrupled its computing power. With a capacity of 125.9 petaflops, this system can execute 125.9 trillion operations per second, making it one of the most powerful supercomputers in Europe.
The Jean Zay supercomputer project
Operated by IDRIS of the CNRS and acquired by GENCI, Jean Zay was produced by Eviden, a company of the Atos group. The extension was officially inaugurated on May 13, 2025 and announced by President Emmanuel Macron. The system stands out for its performance and eco-efficiency, using NVIDIA GPUs GPUs and hot water cooling, the surplus of which is reused for local heating.
Since the start of its operations in 2019, the Jean Zay supercomputer has increased the number of AI projects it supports twenty-fold, from 72 to more than 1,400 by 2024. It also has power available to serve the research community, startups and enterprises, enabling the execution of fundamental AI models, biomedical research, language processing, climate, vehicular autonomy and more.
Since its inauguration, three major projects have been highlighted: the CNRS Polymathic astronomical model, Owkin’ s AI pathology detection and a linguistic modeling tool with traceability developed by Pleias. All of them illustrate the diversity of Jean Zay 4’s applications and its technological potential.
This supercomputer will also be a pillar of the AI Factory France project, an initiative that seeks to promote resources, training and support for the European AI ecosystem. Backed by entities such as Inria, CEA, French Tech and Station-F, the platform seeks to strengthen the continent’s digital sovereignty.
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Source and photo: CNRS
