German neuromorphic supercomputing company SpiNNcloud will deliver a brain-inspired supercomputer to Leipzig University.

The system, which will be used to support research into drug discovery, will comprise 656,640 cores and simulate a minimum of 10.5 billion neurons for AI, HPC, and other applications, making it the largest SpiNNcloud Server System to be deployed to-date.

The system will be powered by approximately 4,320 SpiNNaker2 (Spiking Neural Network Architecture) chips, each of which contains 152 Arm-based cores and specialized accelerators. The chips use a large number of low-power processors to simulate spiking neural networks and support AI workloads, with the system’s parallel architecture consisting of 48 SpiNNaker2 chips per server board.

According to SpiNNcloud, the multi-million euro system will be used to simulate protein folding, helping support the discovery and development of personalized medicine “at faster convergence speeds and under a lower energy profile compared to traditional GPU-based systems.”

Hector Gonzalez, SpiNNcloud co-founder and CEO, said of the deployment: “Our brain-inspired computing architecture is uniquely suited for deploying efficient algorithms that require dynamic sparsity and extreme parallelism.

“Our systems are 18 times more energy efficient than current GPUs and are being used by leading institutions across Europe and the US. The deployment in Leipzig demonstrates the flexibility of our systems, as well as the continued adoption of the technology for unrivaled performance and energy efficiency.”

Developed by German neuromorphic supercomputing company SpiNNcloud Systems GmbH, SpiNNaker2 chips are based on a research project led by the creator of the original Arm architecture, Professor Steve Furber.

In June 2025, SpiNNcloud announced it had delivered a SpiNNaker2 neuromorphic computing system to Sandia National Labs in the US. Reportedly simulating between 150 million and 180 million neurons, that system is one of the five largest neuromorphic computing systems to be deployed globally.