Europe New AMD Powered AI Supercomputer Could Challenge Nvidia's Dominance

Europe is adding a new option to a market where almost every serious AI machine runs on Nvidia. French cloud company Scaleway said Tuesday at its annual AI conference in Paris that it will build an AI supercomputer in Sweden, its first outside France, running on AMD Instinct MI355X chips, according to Reuters.

 Scaleway says it will be the first AMD-based AI supercomputer for commercial use in Europe, open to startups, AI companies and businesses across the continent.

The MI355X is AMD's answer to Nvidia's Blackwell line, but the chip is only half the story. The real contest is software, and a few details show where Scaleway is placing its bet:

• AMD's ROCm platform is open source and runs widely used AI programming tools, while Nvidia's CUDA is proprietary and locks applications to Nvidia hardware
• Bull will assemble and maintain the machine, with servers from Giga Computing, networking from HPE, storage from VAST Data and cooling liquid from Motul
• Scaleway chose Sweden for its largely low-carbon electricity and its AI sector, following a May partnership with telecom firm Tele2

AMD's Stephanie Dismore framed the project as widening choice rather than replacing anyone, saying Scaleway is expanding the infrastructure available to European customers through AMD GPUs and its open software ecosystem.

That is the realistic read too. AMD chips already power research systems such as LUMI in Finland, and US cloud firms including Oracle and Vultr already rent them to European customers, so the novelty is a commercial European operator offering AMD capacity at supercomputer scale.

The reports so far do not give the machine's size, cost or delivery date. As Finimize noted, the question for developers is whether ROCm can lower the cost of switching away from CUDA, since a second source of capacity matters most to buyers who can actually move their workloads between the two.