The MareNostrum 5 supercomputer in Barcelona, Spain, is getting an upgrade.

The European High-Performance Computing Joint Undertaking (EuroHPC JU) has signed a contract for the MareNostrum 5 AI Upgrade project.

The project will be undertaken by a consortium led by Fsas Technologies, Fujitsu’s HPC and AI arm, and Telefónica, with installation expected to take place in the first half of 2026.

The upgrade will include the installation of two new computing partitions, one dedicated to training large language models (LLMs) and another for inference. These will be supported by “next-generation GPUs,” high-speed interconnects, and increased data storage capacity, the latter of which includes a new high-performance AI-oriented file system.

Further details have not been disclosed, but the AI-enabled upgrades will incorporate technologies from Supermicro and Nvidia on the compute side, and IBM and Vast on the storage side. The project will cost around €1.29 million ($1.5m), with financing split equally between EuropHPC and the governments of Spain, Portugal, and Türkiye.

Located at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center in Spain, MareNostrum 5 is a 314 petaflops supercomputer based on Bull Sequana XH3000 and Lenovo ThinkSystem architectures, comprising Intel Sapphire Rapids and Nvidia Grace CPUs alongside Nvidia Hopper GPUs. It was inaugurated in December 2023 and ranked 14th on the latest edition of the Top500 list of most powerful supercomputers.

Launched in 2018 and headquartered in Luxembourg, EuroHPC JU is a joint initiative between the EU, 35 European countries, and private partners to develop a supercomputing ecosystem in Europe.

Its mission is to develop, deploy, extend, and maintain a secure and connected supercomputing and quantum computing ecosystem, while supporting the development of key high-performance computing skills for European science and industry.