Scaleway Is Building Europe's First Commercial AMD AI Supercomputer

For years, training serious AI has meant one thing: Nvidia chips. French cloud company Scaleway just announced a move that cracks that assumption — it will build an AI supercomputer in Sweden that runs entirely on AMD chips, the first AMD-based AI supercomputer built for commercial use in Europe.

The announcement came Tuesday at Scaleway's annual AI conference in Paris. The machine will be Scaleway's first outside France, and it will be open to startups, AI companies, and businesses across the continent.

Under the hood: the system runs AMD's Instinct MI355X — AMD's direct answer to Nvidia's Blackwell line, the chips powering most of the world's AI computing today. It will be assembled and maintained by French firm Bull, with servers from Giga Computing, networking from HPE, storage from VAST Data, and liquid cooling from Motul.

Why Sweden? Scaleway says it picked the location for its largely low-carbon electricity — AI supercomputers are power-hungry, and green electrons matter. It also fits the timing: Scaleway entered the Swedish market in May through a deal with telecom operator Tele2 to sell its cloud and AI services there.

The real story is the software. AI developers code against specific ecosystems, and Nvidia's CUDA is proprietary — code written for it runs only on Nvidia hardware, locking applications to the chipmaker's products. AMD's competing ROCm platform is open-source and runs the same widely used AI programming tools that work on Nvidia chips.

"Scaleway is expanding the choice of AI infrastructure available to customers across Europe, through AMD Instinct GPUs and our open ROCm software ecosystem," said Stephanie Dismore, AMD's senior vice president for EMEA.

AMD chips already power research supercomputers in Europe, including LUMI in Finland. US cloud firms like Oracle and Vultr also rent AMD chips to European customers. But this is the first time the continent gets a flagship commercial machine built on them.

Why it matters: AI's chip shortage has been an Nvidia shortage. Giving European startups a commercial-grade AMD alternative means more compute capacity, more pricing pressure, and — critically for Europe — less dependence on a single vendor's locked-down stack. The CUDA moat isn't dry, but for the first time, Europe is building a bridge across it.