Canada joins European supercomputer network

Canada officially joined Europe’s public network of supercomputers and quantum computers on Oct. 30, becoming a participating state in the European High-Performance Computing Joint Undertaking, known as EuroHPC, the European Commission said.

The announcement came at the Canada-EU summit in Montreal. Researchers and businesses in Canada will be able to apply for time on JUPITER, a supercomputer in Germany, the federal government said, according to BetaKit.

“It means access to a compute power no one can build alone,” AI and digital innovation minister Evan Solomon said at the announcement.

The EuroHPC network includes 14 supercomputers, 10 quantum computers and 19 “AI factories” across Europe, BetaKit reported. The European Commission’s EuroHPC page says countries associated with Horizon Europe or the Digital Europe Programme can join the partnership at any time. Canada’s earlier partial participation in Horizon Europe paved the way, Business AM reported.

Canada also agreed to contribute to Destination Earth, a European Commission climate-modelling project that aims to build a digital twin of the planet and could help predict extreme weather. Henna Virkkunen, the commission’s executive vice-president for tech sovereignty, security and democracy, called it “one of Europe’s most strategic data assets.”

The two sides also plan to connect their instant payment systems so Canadians and Europeans can send money instantly, according to BetaKit.

Virkkunen said Europe has begun enforcing its AI Act this year. “The challenge is that we don’t have these kinds of rules internationally, but the risks are very global,” she said.

Canada becomes one of 38 participants in the network, a group that includes the 27 EU member states as well as partners such as the United Kingdom, Israel, Turkey, Switzerland and Norway, Business AM reported. The partnership has a budget of 8.2 billion euros.

Some analysts expect the effect to be limited. Anton Leicht of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace said agreements like this do little to reduce dependence on U.S. computing power unless the available hardware grows substantially, as the United States keeps building gigawatt-scale computing clusters.

The deal follows Ottawa’s push to build domestic AI capacity. On Thursday the government said it would invest up to $1.6 billion in Cohere, and Solomon said it would not be the last federal stake in a Canadian tech company.

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