Bull CEO Le Roux remains bullish on the French supercomputer maker’s trajectory nearly six months after separating from Atos Group.
It has been nearly six months since Bull separated from Atos Group, the conglomerate that housed the supercomputer company for 12 years. While the separation is not yet fully complete, CEO Emmanuel Le Roux is confident that Bull is fully capable of serving the high-performance computing and artificial intelligence needs of French and European companies through a homegrown supply chain. “From a customer perspective, I think everybody is taking this move as a very positive move,” Le Roux told HPCwire in a recent interview. “Everybody is reassured that Bull will have the capacity for long term to maintain its leadership in HPC and AI. And that’s a very important for our customers because they are committing with us for many, many years when they are purchasing a supercomputer.”
Bull is currently 100% owned by the French government, with its shares held by a French wealth fund that owns all or parts of 80 other French companies, including Thales and EDF, a national electricity utility. Le Roux noted that the government may allow outside investors at some point, but for now, ownership remains entirely state-controlled. The separation from Atos proceeded as smoothly as possible. Although Bull still provides some IT services to the company—a relationship that will continue for several more months—Le Roux emphasized full operational independence. “But from a business perspective, from a governance, we are completely independent,” he said. “It went very smooth. We had a scenario where we thought it would be far more difficult, but we have a good team. We set up a good team and they did a fantastic job to make it successful.”
Retaining the Bull name was not an automatic choice. “We had several options. One was to reuse and relaunch the brand,” Le Roux said. “And to be honest, it was not my preferred scenario.” He initially worried about constantly having to explain the company’s history, but found that fear unfounded when even younger employees expressed enthusiasm for the 95-year-old firm. “We are a new company, a modern company with a lot of legacy, a story behind us,” Le Roux explained. “I changed my mind and we decided to go with Bull. And the adoption has been immediate. Internally, people are proud. Externally, people are proud.”
Bull’s trajectory remains focused on producing some of the world’s most efficient supercomputers. On the Green500 rankings, Bull Sequana systems occupy three of the top 10 slots and 31 of the top 100. This commitment to energy efficiency will persist under the newly independent entity. “Obviously, the less you put in energy, more you can put in CapEx to buy more capacity, or you consume less and it’s more affordable for the planet,” Le Roux said. “And we are continuing to invest big time on this so that we keep the number one position.”
The company currently employs 3,000 people, including engineers, data scientists, and sales and support personnel. Earlier this year, Bull committed to hiring an additional 500 employees, a process currently underway. “We have new experts and new skills coming with energy and knowledge that are complementing the team we have,” the CEO said. “It’s also a positive sign internally that we are growing and we have we are ambitious.”
Regarding its hardware roadmap, Bull maintains short-, medium-, and long-term objectives. It will continue to sell systems equipped with GPUs from AMD and Nvidia while actively broadening its supply chain, with a strategic emphasis on sourcing more components from European providers to bolster technological sovereignty. To illustrate this direction, LUMI-AI, a next-generation supercomputer at the CSC — IT Center for Science Ltd. data center in Kajaani, Finland, will be powered by AMD Instinct MI430X GPUs and 6th Gen AMD EPYC 256-core processors within a Bull Sequana architecture.
In line with European sovereignty goals, Bull recently announced plans to manufacture NVL72 systems for sale across Europe. While demand for these new scale-up systems exists among French and European enterprises, clients strongly prefer European manufacturing. Consequently, Bull is also bringing production in-house for its general-purpose, cloud, and AI divisions, which complement its core supercomputing operations. “There is a big need from big players in Europe for sovereign hardware. And this year is now the only scalable solution in Europe,” Le Roux stated.
Several factors are accelerating this sovereignty push. Ongoing shortages of processors and memory chips have heightened European firms’ desire for greater control over semiconductor supply chains. Additionally, tariffs and quotas that inflate costs and restrict component availability are driving efforts to reshore computer manufacturing. “ All these announcements that there is quota on GPUs, quota on on prioritization of the GPU and the tariff applied as well. And all this it’s giving a lot of uncertainty on the supply chain. And on the other side, we are also fighting with the memory cost increase, right? So the CS has a long term or mid-term enabler to get these components or some of these components develop in Europe so that we de-risk the supply chain for supercomputers,” Le Roux explained.
Networking exemplifies this shift. Rather than relying on Nvidia’s Mellanox interconnects, Bull is developing its own solution, the BullSequana eXascale Interconnect (BXI), scheduled to begin shipping in January 2027. Already on sale, BXI is slated to serve as the networking component for Europe’s second exascale system. “We announced [two weeks ago] the biggest AI factory in Europe called LUMI-AI that will also embed BXI technology for networking,” he said. “And there are many, many other deals that will be announced in the coming weeks where we will replace Nvidia Mellanox by BXI from Bull. So this is an example which is 20% of the value of a supercomputer. We switch from a non European to a European technology.”
Le Roux highlighted that Bull designs and manufactures much of its supercomputers domestically, including circuit boards and racks. “So they see that we are getting more and more sovereign and supply chain independent, our European supply chain for supercomputers,” he said. “And we do that as well for the general-purpose server. And we see that [provides security], in comparison with having a dependency with the Chinese provider or a US providers with all the ups and downs that we see in the press, on the tariff, on the GPU allocation and on the on the on the crisis, like memories.”
Like most of the industry, Bull currently depends on U.S. chipmakers and Taiwanese fabrication plants, particularly TSMC. While dependence on TSMC for advanced chipmaking remains largely unavoidable, Bull is investing in domestic chip design and development, with near-term plans for local component packaging. “ We can design the chip now, and that will be over time an alternative to other non-European players. So we have the capacity,” Le Roux said. “We created partnership in European chip ecosystem to reinforce our capacity to develop chips. We doubled our design and engineering capacity basically to be able to do this new networking technology.” Bull holds a CPU partnership with European chipmaker Kalray and collaborates with various AI accelerator startups. The company will contribute engineering expertise for printed circuit boards and provide funding to help these partners scale, aiming to establish viable alternatives to non-European components within three to five years.
High-performance computing will remain central to Bull’s mission for years to come, increasingly encompassing new workloads running alongside traditional HPC hardware, such as AI models and quantum systems. “What is important and interesting for us is that we see more and more hybrid computing, where HPC classical simulation, where you need a bit of booster with AI,” Le Roux said. “And we believe this is also where we will have the first application of quantum computer. Quantum HPC is really a priority.”
While French sovereignty and supercomputing form the core of the new Bull, the company is also expanding into adjacent sectors through its general-purpose, cloud, and AI divisions. “We are very strong in HPC. We are starting on the AI and cloud, but we believe there is a big potential,” the Bull CEO said. “There is also a big appetite in Europe, in India, in Brazil, to some extent in Canada now to have also sovereign and an alternative technology for AI that we can provide them.” HPC remains vital for major French institutions like the CEA, France’s atomic energy commission, which will purchase Bull supercomputers for many years. Additional French and European organizations are similarly positioning Bull as their sovereign HPC supplier, a dynamic Le Roux believes will strengthen the company’s market position and drive growth. “When we were in the Atos Group, it was a big part of a small part of Atos,” he reflected. “But now it’s at the heart of our commitment. It’s also why we are now, again, an independent company.”