Alice Recoque: France chooses AMD over Nvidia, and it's not a coincidence. / CheapToken News

Published on April 21, 2026 at 07:38

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The French government and AMD have just taken a new step in national technological development. The signing of an intent letter aims to accelerate innovation on the territory and to consolidate France's position in the global AI ecosystem.

The official announcement took place on April 16, 2026 at the Ministry of Economy in Paris. Philippe Baptiste for Research, Sébastien Martin for Industry and Anne Le Hénanff in charge of Digital have welcomed Keith Strier, Senior Vice President of Global AI Markets at AMD.

Alice Recoque, the first exascale supercomputer in France

The central element of the partnership is based on deepening the collaboration with CEA, the Jules Verne consortium and GENCI around the Alice Recoque project. Named in honor of the French pioneer of computing who designed the minicomputer Mitra 15 in the 1970s, this machine will be the first exascale supercomputer in France and the second in Europe, following the German Jupiter, which will be commissioned in Jülich by the end of 2025.

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The term "exascale" refers to the ability to perform more than one billion billion operations per second (10¹⁸ flops), a threshold considered the current frontier of high-performance computing. Alice Recoque will be built by Eviden (Atos group) on the BullSequana XH3500 platform, equipped with next-generation AMD EPYC processors (Venice), AMD Instinct MI430X GPUs and AMD FPGAs, with DDN storage. The project represents a budget of 544 million euros, co-financed by EuroHPC JU through the Digital Europe Programme and the three partners of the Jules Verne consortium: France, Netherlands and Greece. Delivery is expected by mid-2026.

On the environmental front, Eviden's architecture will allow Alice Recoque to operate with 25% fewer racks and up to 50% better energy efficiency per GPU compared to other existing exascale systems. A strong argument at a time when digital sovereignty is becoming a strategic criterion, according to AMD's data. The machine will be used for climate modeling, personalized medicine through digital twins, innovation in materials and energy, and the development of large European AI models.

In parallel, AMD is committed to opening access to its training programs (AMD University Program, AMD AI Developer Program, AMD AI Academy) to strengthen the skills of French researchers, teachers, and developers.

A bet on open source against Nvidia's monopoly

Behind this partnership lies a strategic and software-related challenge. Nvidia holds a very large share of the training GPU market, and its proprietary CUDA software stack locks developers into a closed ecosystem. AMD offers ROCm, an open source alternative that plays the same role on its Instinct chips, with a key difference: its code is freely accessible. The existing French infrastructure is currently largely dominated by Nvidia hardware: Jean Zay, the national AI showcase in Orsay, peaks at 125.9 petaflops under Nvidia GPUs. Only Adastra, in Montpellier, is already running AMD. Alice Recoque aims for more than one exaflop, which is nearly 10 times higher.

Behind this partnership lies a strategic and software challenge. Nvidia holds a very large share of the training GPU market, and its proprietary CUDA software stack locks developers into a closed ecosystem. A dependency comparable to that observed with Microsoft in other sectors, as evidenced by the renewal of the National Education's contract with Microsoft despite sovereignty rhetoric. AMD offers ROCm, an open-source alternative that plays the same role on its Instinct chips, with a significant difference: its code is freely accessible. The existing French infrastructure is today largely dominated by Nvidia hardware: Jean Zay, the national AI showcase in Orsay, peaks at 125.9 petaflops under Nvidia GPUs. Only Adastra, in Montpellier, is already running AMD. Alice Recoque aims for more than one exaflop, which is nearly 10 times more.

An excellence center will also be established to support the creation of the future AI Factory France. Anne Le Hénanff summarized the challenge during the signing:

« There is no AI without infrastructure. To build a solid and sustainable digital future, we must act at all levels of the value chain and diversify our partnerships. I commend AMD's strong commitment to engage with our startup ecosystem and contribute to a more resilient and innovative environment. »

It remains to be seen whether the ROCm bet will fulfill its promises against CUDA's dominance over large language models. This choice is part of a broader European movement, where dependency on American cloud giants is the subject of growing debates.