Ireland’s University of Galway, in collaboration with the European High-Performance Computing Joint Undertaking (EuroHPC JU), has published an invitation for tender for the acquisition, delivery, installation, and maintenance of a supercomputer dubbed CASPIr (Computation Analysis and Simulation Platform for Ireland).

The deadline to submit a participation request is May 5, 2026. Following this, the partners will review the submissions, and successful candidates will be invited to submit a tender.

Described as a “mid-range” supercomputer, the 15 petaflops CASPIr will be operated by the Irish Centre for High-End Computing (ICHEC), based at the University of Galway.

The total budget for the system is €25 million ($29m), set to be co-funded by the Irish government and EuroHPC JU as part of a five-year collaboration agreement, signed in October 2025. EuroHPC JU will put up 35 percent of the funds, with the Digital Europe Programme and the Irish government providing the remaining 65 percent.

Once live, CASPIr will serve a range of users in the scientific community, industry, and the public sector, supporting AI and machine learning workloads, in addition to small-scale training and inference tasks as part of larger simulation and data analysis workflows.

It will be the successor to the ICHEC’s Kay supercomputer, which had 665 teraflops of compute power but was decommissioned in November 2023.

Following the shutdown of that system, the Irish government was criticized by opposition parties for failing to acquire a new supercomputer. In May 2024, Sinn Féin’s Louise O’Reilly said that “the failure by the government to invest in this critical infrastructure has embarrassed Ireland in the eyes of the European and international technology community.”

Ireland was selected as the host site for a EuroHPC supercomputer in June 2022, but when O’Reilly made her comments, no timeline for the deployment of CASPIr had been shared.

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.

In December 2024, the EuroHPC JU announced plans to deploy five new AI-optimized supercomputers by the end of 2026. An additional six sites were announced in March 2025, with the initiative going on to add six further AI factories to its network of existing hubs in October of that same year, bringing the total number across Europe to 19.