by the consortium formed by the Government of Spain and the Generalitat of Catalonia, Portugal and Türkiye.
The European High Performance Computing Joint Undertaking (EuroHPC JU), the European Union's supercomputing initiative, has signed the contract for the MareNostrum 5 AI Upgrade project with the consortium led by Fsas Technologies, Fujitsu's HPC (High-Performance Computing) and AI specialist arm, and Telefónica, selected in the call for tenders launched last July. The expansion represents a step forward in strengthening European supercomputing capabilities in artificial intelligence (AI).
The purpose of this upgrade is to acquire an extension to equip MareNostrum 5 with new capabilities that enable the optimal execution of AI workloads, in order to serve SMEs and startups across Europe, as well as public administrations, through the EuroHPC-driven AI Factories, including the BSC AI Factory, located at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center – Centro Nacional de Supercomputación (BSC-CNS).
With an approximate budget of €129,000,000, the project is 50% co-financed by EuroHPC and the other 50% by Spain, Portugal and Türkiye. Of the percentage corresponding to Spain, the funding will come from the Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities, the State Secretariat for Digitization and Artificial Intelligence (SEDIA), under the Ministry for Digital Transformation and the Civil Service, and the Generalitat of Catalonia.
The upgrade will include the installation of two new computing partitions, one dedicated to training large language models (LLMs) and another for their application (inference), an enhancement of storage capabilities with a new high-performance AI-oriented file system and new technologies, as well as a suite of specialized software.
The system, which will be installed during the first half of 2026, will use two appropriately interconnected BSC facilities—the BSC headquarters data center, which already hosts MareNostrum 5, and the Torre Girona Chapel—and will incorporate technologies from Supermicro (hardware), IBM (storage and software), VAST (storage), and NVIDIA (software and hardware).
With this new extension of MareNostrum 5, EuroHPC and BSC will boost Europe’s AI supercomputing capabilities and facilitate the adoption and use of these technologies by industry, with a particular emphasis on SMEs, startups, and public administrations based in the countries participating in the AI Factory initiatives.
This article was first published on 26 January 2026 by the Barcelona Supercomputing Centre.
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