European science ‘hugely dependent’ on US chips

European science is wholly dependent on US and Taiwanese semiconductors and urgently needs to build up domestic alternatives, according to the leader of one of the EU’s biggest supercomputing centres.

Christian Canton, associate director at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC) told the Science|Business annual conference on January 5 that more “resilience” is needed “so that our science will not just have a strong dependency on powers that we cannot control,” he said. “Otherwise, we are doomed.”

BSC is Spain’s national supercomputing centre, and hosts MareNostrum, one of Europe’s most powerful clusters. But particularly when it comes to GPUs, the chips that power certain types of AI model training, Europe has a “huge dependence” on Nvidia, the US chipmaker, Canton said. “It’s something that worries me.” 

BSC has to update its computers every five years, he said, meaning a constant reliance on overseas chipmakers. With no European alternative, BSC goes into negotiations with chipmakers “with zero advantage,” he said. “The price is fixed because it’s mostly a monopoly.” 

Should a “big geopolitical incident” cut off supply of GPUs, “we will become rapidly obsolete,” he went on. 

In 2029, BSC will revamp MareNostrum once again, with new processors, Canton said. One of the preconditions is that a “non-negligible” amount of the technology that goes into it will be designed in Europe. 

This means these chips “might not be the fastest,” Canton went on. “We might not be competitive with Nvidia.” But this kind of requirement will “at least allow Europe to develop the muscle on how you design chips,” he said. “So, in 10 years, we might be competitive.” 

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But for other European supercomputing projects, such as the mooted gigafactories, huge clusters of GPUs backed by €20 billion in EU funding, including European technology is only a recommendation, not a requirement, he said. Instead, policies should be more “aggressive” to build up European capacity. Currently, Europe was only taking “baby steps” towards what was needed, he said. 

Fabio Venuti, a manager at the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts, concurred that dependence on foreign chips was a risk for European science. “There is not much we can do,” he told the conference. His centre was trying to “keep our architectures as flexible as possible so we can adapt.”