French cloud provider Scaleway plans to build an artificial-intelligence supercomputer in Sweden using AMD accelerators, expanding Europe’s AI infrastructure while giving customers another alternative to Nvidia-dominated computing platforms.
The project will use AMD’s Instinct MI355X chips and will become Scaleway’s first AI supercomputer located outside France.
Scaleway says the system will be commercially available to startups, AI developers and other European businesses.
The project is notable because Nvidia currently dominates the market for accelerators used to train and operate advanced AI models.
AMD has been attempting to narrow that gap with its Instinct hardware and ROCm software platform.
Unlike Nvidia’s proprietary CUDA ecosystem, ROCm is open-source and supports widely used AI programming frameworks, giving customers another route for deploying large computing workloads.
Sweden offers several advantages for large-scale computing infrastructure.
Its relatively low-carbon electricity system can reduce the emissions associated with energy-intensive AI workloads, while the country’s technology sector is attracting additional data-center and cloud investment.
Scaleway entered Sweden earlier this year through a partnership with telecom operator Tele2.
The new supercomputer will be built and maintained by Bull, with additional infrastructure supplied by companies including Giga Computing, Hewlett Packard Enterprise and VAST Data.
The project forms part of a broader European effort to expand locally available AI computing capacity while diversifying the hardware used to power it.
For AMD, the Swedish project provides another commercial reference point as it challenges Nvidia for large AI installations.
For Europe, the larger question is whether projects such as Scaleway’s can expand locally controlled computing capacity quickly enough to meet rapidly increasing AI demand.
