According to DCD, Germany’s Leibniz Supercomputing Centre (LRZ) in Munich is receiving €500 million ($575.85m) from the Free State Bavaria for a major expansion project. Construction began in October 2025 with a groundbreaking ceremony for a new substation in Garching that will begin operations in 2028, supplying 50MVA each to two transformers. The expansion includes renovations already underway for the upcoming Blue Lion supercomputer expected in 2027, plus a five-floor northern extension for power and cooling infrastructure that will increase the site’s capacity from 10MW to 40MW by 2028. This massive investment represents Germany’s strategic commitment to maintaining leadership in high-performance computing as scientific demands escalate.
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The Power Infrastructure Behind Next-Generation Computing
The scale of this expansion reveals the extraordinary power requirements of modern supercomputing. Moving from 10MW to 40MW represents more than just incremental growth—it’s a fundamental shift in infrastructure planning. The new substation delivering 50MVA to dual transformers indicates redundancy and reliability planning that’s essential for research continuity. What’s particularly telling is the timeline: construction starting in 2025 for 2028 operational capacity suggests these projects require multi-year lead times, making accurate forecasting of future computing needs absolutely critical. The electrical infrastructure being built today must anticipate computing demands that won’t materialize for another 3-5 years, creating significant planning challenges for research institutions.
Advanced Cooling Systems and Energy Efficiency
The reported PUE of just under 1.05 for LRZ’s AI and supercomputing systems through water cooling represents state-of-the-art efficiency that few commercial data centers can match. This exceptional efficiency comes from direct liquid cooling systems that remove heat directly from processors and other components, rather than relying on traditional air conditioning. The waste heat recovery system—currently heating office buildings with plans to expand to the research campus—demonstrates sophisticated energy management that turns a major operational cost into a valuable resource. As HPE develops the Blue Lion system featuring Nvidia Blackwell GPUs, the cooling infrastructure must handle unprecedented thermal densities that could exceed 50kW per rack in advanced AI systems.
The Quantum Leap in Computing Performance
The Blue Lion supercomputer’s expected 30x performance increase over the current SuperMUC-NG system represents one of the most significant generational jumps in European supercomputing history. This isn’t merely incremental improvement—it’s a transformative capability upgrade that will enable entirely new classes of scientific simulation and AI model training. The combination of traditional HPC with quantum computing (LRZ already hosts an IQM quantum computer) and specialized AI clusters creates a heterogeneous computing environment where different workloads can run on optimally suited hardware. This architectural approach reflects the evolving nature of scientific computing, where no single computing paradigm dominates research requirements.
Strategic Implications for European Research
This €500 million investment signals Bavaria’s determination to maintain Europe’s competitive position in the global race for computing supremacy. As scientific research becomes increasingly computational—from climate modeling to drug discovery to materials science—access to cutting-edge computing resources becomes a strategic national asset. The timing is particularly significant given the escalating computational demands of AI research, where training large language models and other AI systems requires unprecedented computing resources. By building infrastructure that can support “subsequent supercomputers and AI clusters,” LRZ is positioning itself not just for immediate needs but for the next decade of computational science evolution, ensuring European researchers don’t become dependent on computing resources located in other global regions.
