April 23, 2025. The Executive Vice-President of the European Commission for Technological Sovereignty, Security and Democracy, Henna Virkkunen, visited Forschungszentrum Jülich. The focus of her visit was the newly founded JUPITER AI Factory, part of the network of AI factories in the European Union.
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“I congratulate the Jülich Supercomputing Center. This is an AI factory powered by Europe’s first exascale supercomputer, one of the most powerful and energy-efficient supercomputers in the world,” said Executive Vice-President of the European Commission Henna Virkkunen on the occasion of her visit to Jülich. “This state-of-the-art facility, which will be inaugurated in a few months, is more than just a milestone. Together with other AI factories, it is the cornerstone of our AI continent strategy: we are promoting German and European AI innovations and taking a major step towards greater competitiveness. I am starting my tour of Europe’s up-and-coming AI factories here in Jülich. Their creativity and transformative potential are an inspiration. The future of Europe as an AI continent is being forged right here, right now.”
The EU aims to become a global leader in the field of artificial intelligence (AI). The EU Commission recently presented the measures and strategies for this in the action plan for the AI continent in five key areas. Within this framework, Europe’s AI and supercomputing infrastructure is to be strengthened with a network of AI factories. 13 of these AI factories will be built around world-leading supercomputers in Europe, one of them in Jülich in North Rhine-Westphalia: the JUPITER AI Factory (JAIF).
The JUPITER AI Factory, or JAIF for short, aims to strengthen research and industry in strategically important fields of application for artificial intelligence – such as health, energy, climate change, education, media, the public sector and finance. A particular focus is on supporting small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and start-ups in training trustworthy AI models. The JAIF consortium consists of Forschungszentrum Jülich, RWTH Aachen University, Fraunhofer Gesellschaft (Fraunhofer Institute for Applied Information Technology, FIT, and Fraunhofer Institute for Intelligent Analysis and Information Systems, IAIS) and hessian.AI and is led by Prof. Thomas Lippert, Director of the Jülich Supercomputing Centre, JSC.
“AI needs speed, and we are proud that JUPITER is built lightning fast and computes lightning fast. With the JUPITER AI Factory, we are establishing an open innovation ecosystem for AI that combines scientific excellence, economic value creation and social benefit,” emphasized Prof. Kobus Kuipers, member of the Board of Directors of Forschungszentrum Jülich. With JUPITER and the JUPITER AI Factory, North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany and Europe are laying the foundation for the necessary further expansion of computing capacities for AI.
EU Commissioner Virkkunen was also given an insight into Jülich’s quantum research and JUNIQ – the quantum computing infrastructure based at JSC provides access to various quantum computers for research and industry – as well as Jülich’s brain research with the digital infrastructure platform EBRAINS, which is based on the principles of biological information processing in order to promote innovations, for example in medicine or the development of novel AI architectures.
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👉 https://commission.europa.eu/index_de
Photo: Jülich Research Center
