Serbian gov’t signs contact with Eviden for €50m supercomputer

The Serbian government has signed a contract with Eviden – the supercomputing unit of French IT firm Atos – to acquire a supercomputer.

Initially signed in June 2024, the contract forms part of a wider governmental agreement between Serbia and France.

The total cost of the agreement is €50 million ($55m), with €36 million to be spent on the supercomputer and the remainder allocated for AI-focused projects across the healthcare, energy, transport, and government sectors.

Serbia’s government currently operates at least one unnamed supercomputer, manufactured by Nvidia and housed in the country’s State Data Center in Kragujevac. Launched in December 2021, the €30 million ($33.8m) system did not make it onto the most recent edition of the Top500 list of the world’s fastest supercomputers.

However, after the contract was signed with the French government, Mihailo Jovanovic, head of Serbia’s office for IT and eGovernment, said the new supercomputer has 20x more chips than the Nvidia supercomputer and would have almost 30 times more storage.

The recently purchased system is expected to arrive in Serbia by the end of 2025, but no additional technical details about the system have been disclosed by the government.

Local news outlet Blic reported that Jovanovic had previously said the Serbian government was engaged in talks with its French counterparts to acquire Eviden’s latest-generation BullSequana supercomputer. The government also plans to invest €40m in upgrading the Nvidia system, separately telling Blic in October 2024 that a €5m ($5.5m) contract had already been signed to make the existing machine 7x faster.

Work on the €30m ($33.8m) State Data Center in the central city of Kragujevac began in 2019, opening in 2020.

The government said the data center spans two facilities covering an area of about 14,000 sqm (150,700 sq ft); some five times larger than the previous facility in Belgrade. Built to Tier IV standards, it offers hosting services to enterprises and other Governments as well as hosting Serbian state data.