Digital Single Market: Commission welcomes Council’s support to boost supercomputing infrastructure in Europe

The Commission welcomed the Council’s decision to support its plans to invest jointly with the Member States in building a world-class infrastructure for supercomputing in Europe.

Vice-President for the Digital Single Market Andrus Ansip and Commissioner for Digital Economy and Society Mariya Gabriel said in a joint statement: “Joining forces for building European supercomputing capacity is essential for the EU’s competitiveness and independence in the data economy. […] Supercomputing is already changing the lives of European citizens, be it through personalised medicine or energy saving, or by helping to tackle global challenges through climate change modelling, preventing and controlling epidemics, and advancing neuroscience. As no European country has the capacity to develop these resources individually, cooperation, knowledge-sharing and the pooling of resources at European level are essential.” You can read the full statement here. The cooperation initiative – EuroHPC Joint Undertaking– is a legal and funding instrument under the Digital Single Market strategy that will pool EU, national and private investments to rank European supercomputers among the world’s top three by 2022-2023. The Commission envisages around €1 billion of public funding to be invested in the HPC Joint Undertaking by 2020, with the EU’s contribution of around €486 million, matched by a similar amount from Member States and associated countries. The Joint Undertaking was proposed by the Commission on 11 January 2018, and builds on the European declaration on High-Performance Computing launched in 2017. The European Parliament will vote on this proposal in July, before the Regulation is formally adopted by the Council of the EU. A press release, a Q&A and a factsheet are available.