French Bull doubles Angers supercomputer output after €80M rebuild

French state-owned supercomputer maker Bull said it doubled production at its Angers factory to 12 racks a month after an €80 million rebuild, formally opening the new production building on Friday as Europe races to expand AI compute.

Europe keeps saying it wants AI supercomputers it controls. Bull's Angers line going from six racks a month to twelve — with Alice Recoque and LUMI-AI built in the same hall — is the factory math behind that talk, not another summit slide.

On Friday, 2 October 2026, Bull formally opened a new production building at its factory in Angers, in western France. The Next Web reported the opening that morning. Bull is the French state-owned company that builds supercomputers, the very large machines used for science and, more and more, for artificial intelligence. A rack is one cabinet of such a machine. Executives told Reuters the Angers line now assembles 12 racks a month, twice the six it assembled before an €80 million rebuild. Reuters first reported that expansion on Thursday.

Reuters’s exclusive says Bull reopened the expanded factory on Thursday, 1 October 2026, to double production capacity. The StreetInsider page of that story stamps October 1, 2026, 5:58 p.m. Eastern. The byline is Leo Marchandon. The dateline on the copy is Oct. 1. Executives told Reuters the expansion cost €80 million, that output has already doubled from six racks a month to 12, and that the plant can raise output to 24 racks next year on demand they expect to keep growing. The Next Web’s Friday story says output could rise to 24 racks next year if demand continues to grow. Twelve, 24, and €80 million are the figures in those reports. The reports give no price per rack and no revenue figure for the factory.

What the company says the site is. The Next Web, citing Bull, says Angers is the only site in Europe that can assemble supercomputers at large scale, and that the wider reconstruction of the site finishes in 2028. Reuters calls the Angers plant the only factory in Europe dedicated to building these machines. Reuters also says the expansion is meant to support a European Union commitment of €7 billion over 2021–2027 for a network of supercomputers, aimed at narrowing the gap in computing power with the United States and China. Computing power, here, means the machines that do the work. The €7 billion figure is Reuters’s. The “only site” and 2028 lines are the company’s, as The Next Web reports them.

The extra room is so two large orders can be built at the same time. Executives told Reuters the two could not have been built side by side before the expansion. The first is Alice Recoque, named for the computer scientist Alice Recoque. It accounts for 94 racks and is for the CEA, France’s atomic energy commission. Reuters also calls the CEA France’s nuclear agency. The Next Web calls Alice Recoque a 94-rack exascale system. Exascale means the fastest class of supercomputer: The Next Web defines it as a machine that can perform at least one quintillion calculations a second. A quintillion is a billion billions. Ninety-four racks is a little under eight months of work for a line that finishes 12 racks a month, if that line built nothing else.

The second order is in the same hall, so that calendar is only a yardstick. LUMI-AI is for Kajaani, Finland. The Next Web, citing Bull, calls it a €387.8 million system and the largest contract in Bull’s history. Reuters rounds the price to €388 million and also calls it Bull’s biggest-ever contract. The company told The Next Web that both machines are due in 2027. Reuters reported a different clock and a different bill for Alice Recoque: delivery in stages from the end of this year, at a cost of €554 million to the French government and the European Union. The 2027 date is the company’s, via The Next Web. The staged delivery and the €554 million figure are Reuters’s.

Emmanuel Le Roux, Bull’s chief executive, told Reuters that Bull has received more orders this year than at any time before. He said Bull has won 15 of the 18 tenders issued by EuroHPC, the European Union body that co-funds Europe’s supercomputers with member countries. A tender is a formal competition for a public contract. Reuters says Bull was competing with companies including Hewlett Packard Enterprise. Fifteen of 18 is Le Roux’s count in that story.

Bull built JUPITER, which Reuters calls Europe’s first exascale machine, now running at the Jülich centre in Germany. Reuters spells the centre Juelich. The Next Web calls it the Jülich research centre and calls JUPITER Europe’s first exascale supercomputer. Reuters reported that cloud operator OVHcloud and European Commission-backed Domyn are both trying to train frontier-class artificial-intelligence models on JUPITER, along with other companies Bull declined to name. Frontier-class means models at the leading edge of what current systems can do. The Next Web describes Domyn as an Italian artificial-intelligence company. The training effort is Reuters’s report. The pages do not say those models are finished.

The French state became Bull’s sole shareholder on 31 March 2026, when it finished buying the business from Atos. Reuters reported that the purchase valued Bull at up to €404 million. That figure is Reuters’s valuation of the deal. It is not a sales total, and it is not a price for a rack. Le Roux told Reuters the original motive was strategic. In the 1980s, he said, after the United States stopped shipping supercomputers to the CEA, France turned to Bull to build the machines used to simulate nuclear tests. That history is his account, as Reuters reports it.

Roland Lescure, France’s economy minister, is quoted by The Next Web: “It is imperative that France and Europe retain control over their own computing capabilities.” That sentence is his, in Friday’s story.

The Angers factory assembles systems with Nvidia, AMD, or Intel processors, or with European parts, depending on the customer. Executives told Reuters that European-made components now make up about 70 percent of the machines being built, compared with 20 to 30 percent five years ago. On Friday, in a separate Reuters interview at the factory, Le Roux said Bull can now source around 70 percent of the components in Europe — boards, the links between cabinets, cooling systems, and increasingly the processors — up from 20 to 30 percent five years ago. Those links are called interconnects: the cables and switches that let the cabinets work as one machine. He said memory is the remaining gap. “The problem is memory,” he told Reuters. “We don’t see anything coming.” Memory chips hold the data a machine is working on, and a supercomputer needs them in huge quantities. He said processors account for 10 to 20 percent of a supercomputer’s value, and that Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron produce over 90 percent of the world’s memory. He pointed to European processor work — SiPearl, in which Reuters says Bull holds a stake, plus Vsora and Openchip — and said European memory projects would take a long time. Those lines are his, in Friday’s interview.

Bull’s next use for the site is artificial-intelligence servers, The Next Web reports. An AI server is a computer built to train or run an artificial-intelligence model, rather than a science supercomputer alone. Under a partnership agreed in June, The Next Web says Foxconn will make parts of Nvidia’s Vera Rubin NVL72 in the Czech Republic, with final assembly in Angers. Reuters describes the same June partnership as Bull and Taiwan’s Foxconn manufacturing Nvidia’s NVL systems at a plant in the Czech Republic, again with final assembly in Angers. Vera Rubin NVL72 is the name The Next Web uses for that Nvidia system. Bull told The Next Web it will name further manufacturing partners in early 2027. The reports do not give a price for the Foxconn work, and they do not say those servers are already leaving Angers.

The picture is the Bull logo on the front of the Angers factory. An orange mark sits to the left of large blue letters spelling BULL. Behind them, a white screen is cut into a pattern of bare branches. The sky is clear, and trees fill the lower corners. A purple block in the lower right reads TNW. The frame does not print a calendar date. It is a photograph of the factory front, credited to Bull and used by The Next Web with Friday’s story. It shows the sign on the building, not a rack inside the hall.

In plain terms, Bull, now owned entirely by the French state, has doubled assembly at Angers from six racks a month to 12 after an €80 million rebuild, and it opened the new production building on Friday. Reuters reported the doubling on Thursday. The company says the extra space lets it build Alice Recoque and LUMI-AI side by side, and that both are due in 2027. Reuters says Alice Recoque arrives in stages from the end of this year at a cost of €554 million to France and the European Union. Le Roux says this is Bull’s busiest year for orders, and that Bull has won 15 of 18 EuroHPC tenders. The step up to 24 racks next year is what executives told Reuters the plant can do if demand keeps growing. The figure of up to €404 million is Reuters’s valuation of the March purchase from Atos.