Bull has been awarded €40m to deliver the HLRE-5 supercomputer to the German Climate Computing Center, powered by Nvidia GB200 Superchips and Vera CPUs.

High-performance computing company Bull has been awarded a €40 million ($45m) contract by DKRZ, the German Climate Computing Center, to deliver the High-performance Computing System for the Earth System Research (HLRE-5) supercomputer.

The system is expected to come online in early 2028. The contract runs for five years and includes support services.

Once operational, HLRE-5 will support both physics-based simulations and AI-driven climate research, DKRZ said in a statement. The center said the system will reduce the energy required per simulated year by around 75 percent compared with its current supercomputer, Levante.

HLRE-5 is based on Bull's XH3500 platform and will comprise two partitions: a GPU partition powered by Nvidia GB200 Superchips and a CPU partition containing Nvidia Vera CPUs. The system will use direct liquid cooling. Nodes will be interconnected by Nvidia Quantum-2 InfiniBand networking. Storage will be provided by an IBM Storage Scale System 6000, which combines 60PB of high-capacity disk drive storage, with up to 340 Gbps throughput, and a dedicated 500TB flash tier.

A district heating system will allow DKRZ to use waste heat from the system to heat the University of Hamburg.

"The new system will allow us to drastically reduce the energy needed for our users' climate simulations," said Dr. Hendryk Bockelmann, head of DKRZ's applications department. "For a center that exists to study the climate, that is not a side benefit – it is part of the job."

Dr. Martin Matzke, head of Northern and Central Europe at Bull, added: "We are proud to continue our long-standing collaboration with DKRZ, one of Europe's leading climate computing centers. HLRE-5 builds on years of joint innovation in energy-efficient supercomputing and demonstrates how advanced digital infrastructure can support excellent climate research."

The contract award comes six months after the French state completed its acquisition of Bull, the former HPC and quantum subsidiary of Atos. The deal followed the signing of a €404m ($469m) share purchase agreement between Atos and the French State in July 2025.

Bull's BullSequana HPC systems form the basis for a number of the world's most powerful supercomputers. Its X series architecture supports exascale-class systems, including Europe's first exascale system, the Jupiter Booster.

Earlier this year, Bull secured a €30 million ($35m) five-year contract in April 2026 to provide AI-optimized infrastructure at Sweden's Mimer AI factory, also based on Bull's BullSequana XH3500 architecture. Bull was also selected by the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking (EuroHPC JU) and the Lumi AI factory consortium to deliver the Lumi-AI supercomputer, which will be hosted at the CSC data center in Kajaani, Finland. Separately, Bull was awarded a €31 million ($36m) contract with the Spanish State Meteorological Agency (AEMET) to deliver supercomputing infrastructure.