Airbus Deploys Bull‑Sequana XH3000 HPC‑as‑a‑Service Supercomputer

Regulatory action → What it requires → Compliance timeline

• Regulation: EU Commission Decision 2024/1125 on "High‑Performance Computing Services as Cloud‑Like Offerings" (effective 1 July 2025).
• Requirement: Providers must disclose total compute capacity, energy‑use metrics and data‑localisation guarantees in a public service‑level agreement (SLA).
• Compliance deadline: Full disclosure to be posted no later than 30 days after the first commercial use of the service.

What the contract entails

Airbus signed a five‑year, all‑inclusive agreement with Bull (the French high‑performance compute business acquired from Atos) valued at close to €100 million.

• Hardware footprint – Two containerised racks were delivered to the Toulouse site in December 2025 and to Hamburg in April 2026.
• Compute – The BullSequana XH3000 chassis houses a mix of AMD Epyc Genoa (8‑core, 3.5 GHz) and Turin (16‑core, 2.9 GHz) blades together with Nvidia H100 GPU blades.
• Storage – IBM Spectrum Scale appliances provide a shared parallel file system with a raw capacity of roughly 200 PB.
• Interconnect – Nvidia InfiniBand NDR links the two sites at 400 Gbps per port, allowing the two clusters to operate as a single logical supercomputer.

How the service is delivered

Bull supplies the platform under an HPC‑as‑a‑Service model. Airbus pays a fixed annual fee that covers hardware depreciation, power, cooling, system administration and software licences. The model also includes:

1. Managed support – 24 × 7 remote monitoring, on‑site hardware replacement within four hours, and quarterly performance reviews.
2. Software stack – Pre‑installed MPI, OpenMP, CUDA, and the CODA CFD suite jointly developed by DLR, ONERA and Airbus.
3. Energy‑recovery – Waste heat is captured and redistributed to adjacent Airbus facilities, reducing overall site power‑usage effectiveness (PUE) to 1.25.

Compliance implications for Airbus

Because the service falls under the EU HPC‑as‑a‑Service framework, Airbus must:

• Publish a transparency report by 31 July 2025 detailing the total FLOP count, storage allocation and the proportion of data stored within the EU.
• Conduct a data‑protection impact assessment (DPIA) for any personal data processed on the platform, in line with GDPR Article 35.
• Maintain a sovereign‑cloud clause in the contract that guarantees all Airbus‑originated data remains on EU‑based infrastructure, satisfying the Euro‑cloud migration roadmap announced earlier this year.

Timeline to full compliance

Date	Milestone
1 July 2025	EU HPC‑as‑a‑Service regulation becomes effective
15 July 2025	Bull provides detailed capacity and energy‑use metrics
31 July 2025	Airbus publishes the required transparency report
30 September 2025	DPIA completed and approved by Airbus DPO
1 October 2025	All workloads migrated to the new BullSequana XH3000 system
Ongoing	Quarterly performance and compliance reviews

Why the upgrade matters

The new platform delivers approximately three times the performance of Airbus’s legacy HPE cluster. This increase enables more detailed digital‑twin simulations, faster aerodynamic optimisation and the ability to run AI‑enhanced design loops within days rather than weeks. Airbus plans to run CODA CFD workloads, high‑fidelity structural analyses and emerging quantum‑accelerated algorithms on the system.

Looking ahead

Bull has hinted at collaborative research into quantum‑ready algorithms, but those details remain confidential. The contract’s five‑year horizon gives Airbus a predictable cost base while allowing the company to scale compute resources in line with its Euro‑cloud strategy.

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For further technical details on the BullSequana XH3000 platform, see the official Bull documentation. The IBM Spectrum Scale storage solution is described in the IBM product guide. Nvidia’s InfiniBand NDR specifications are available on the Nvidia website.