Scaleway adds AMD supercomputer and Nvidia GPUs in Nordics

Scaleway, the French cloud provider of the Iliad group, announced two new AI computing infrastructures in Northern Europe in a single day. The first is an AI supercomputer in Sweden based on AMD Instinct MI355X chips. The second is a GPU Zone in Copenhagen powered by systems built on Nvidia GPUs of the HGX B300 family. The two moves were presented on Tuesday at the annual ai-PULSE conference. The event was hosted at Station F in Paris, the French capital’s famous startup campus. European founders and AI companies are looking for computing capacity outside the big American hyperscalers. The expansion of the Scaleway AI supercomputer in the North gives them a European alternative, sovereign in legal and energy terms more than in technological ones.

Two new moves in Northern Europe

The simultaneous announcement outlines a two-track strategy. In Sweden, a supercomputer dedicated to model training and inference will be built. In Denmark, Scaleway will open a GPU Zone. It will feature thousands of Nvidia GPUs intended for the same workloads. Both facilities will be open to startups, AI companies and businesses from across the continent.

The choice of the North is no coincidence. Sweden and Denmark offer low-carbon electricity and an established tech sector. In the Danish case, the cool climate reduces the energy needed for data center cooling. Scaleway also entered the Swedish market in May, with an agreement with operator Tele2 to sell cloud and AI services.

The AMD-based Swedish supercomputer

The Swedish facility will achieve two firsts. It will be the first AI supercomputer of its kind outside France. According to Scaleway, it will also be the first commercial AMD-based AI supercomputer in Europe. On the technical side, AMD presents the Instinct MI355X as a direct answer to Nvidia’s Blackwell line, which currently dominates the global AI computing market. According to AMD, the new GPU offers 60 percent more memory than the GB200 and B200. Inference performance is up to 35 times higher than the previous AMD generation.

The strategic point is the software. AMD’s ROCm ecosystem is open source, unlike Nvidia’s proprietary CUDA platform. It therefore reduces dependence on a single vendor.

“Scaleway is expanding the AI infrastructure choices available to customers across Europe, through Instinct GPUs and our open ROCm software ecosystem,” said Stephanie Dismore, senior vice president EMEA at AMD.

Tele2 also stresses the signal value of the investment. “This supercomputer sends a clear signal about Sweden’s attractiveness for AI infrastructures,” said Stefan Trampus, the Swedish operator’s head of business-to-business.

The Copenhagen GPU Zone with Nvidia

In Copenhagen, Scaleway will open a GPU Zone based on Nvidia HGX B300 systems, the latest Blackwell generation from Jensen Huang’s company. Each baseboard hosts eight Blackwell GPUs with 288 GB of memory each. The total reaches 2,304 GB, about 2.3 TB of GPU memory per unit. The configuration is designed for training and inference of large models.

Denmark is not new territory for the French group. Among the customers already active are the City of Copenhagen and Corti. Corti is a company specialized in AI applied to healthcare.

European sovereignty: promise and limits

Damien Lucas is the CEO of Scaleway. He framed the move in strategic terms: “Access to high-performance computing for AI is becoming a strategic priority for European organizations.” The new GPU Zone, he added, brings the latest Nvidia technologies closer to customers “while staying true to our commitment to European technological independence.” Together with the site already active in Paris, according to press reports, the three facilities are expected to reach tens of thousands of GPUs and dozens of exaflops of computing power. In parallel, Scaleway announced cloud availability zones in Stockholm and Frankfurt in 2027. It also announced a partnership with the data and AI platform Dataiku. The goal is to develop projects in a sovereign European cloud.

A fundamental contradiction remains, however. All the new European facilities will run on chips designed by two American companies, AMD and Nvidia, and manufactured largely in Taiwan. The independence promised by Scaleway is therefore above all jurisdictional and energy-related, not technological. Data remains under EU law and the energy is clean. The silicon remains American. This is the central crux of the debate on European digital sovereignty. For those investing in AI computing on the continent, the distinction matters more than any slogan.

Sources:

• La sfida AI dell’Europa passa dal Nord: Scaleway scommette su… | ainews.it