French supercomputer company Bull is under new ownership.
IT outsourcer Atos sold Bull to the French government this week for a mere €404 million (around $460 million) after acquiring the company for €620 million (then $860 million) in May 2014.
The government was acting to protect national security interests: Bull’s supercomputers are used by the French national nuclear weapons research laboratory, CEA-DAM.
It’s the second time that Bull has been nationalized: The first time, in 1982 was to save it from bankruptcy.
Atos, has had financial troubles of its own. In August 2024, it tried — and failed — to sell its legacy infrastructure management business. The company had already staved off possible bankruptcy thanks to some refinancing from banks and the French government. That was after it had contemplated selling its IT security business.
Bull still retains some pedigree. As part of Atos subsidiary Eviden it built Jupiter, the world’s fourth most-powerful computer at time of writing, with a computing capacity of 1 exaflop (1 billion billion floating-point operations per second). It is also a member of a consortium building Europe’s second exa-scale computing system, Alice Recoque, due for delivery in 2027.