The French government already indicated in 2024 to the IT company Atos that it wants to buy part of its business, classifying it as strategically important. The agreement announced in July 2025 foresees the French state becoming the sole owner of Bull through the state’s share management agency APE.
When Atos took over Bull in 2014, the value of the company was estimated at around 620 million euros, which leads to the conclusion that its value within the conglomerate has dropped significantly. The value of the current transaction amounts to EUR 404 million, including debt and up to EUR 104 million in variable fees related to the achievement of business goals, Atos announced.
Bull today combines activities in the field of high performance computing (HPC), quantum technologies, business computing and artificial intelligence and employs around 3,000 people worldwide, approximately half of them in France. In 2025, it achieved an income of 720 million euros.
France is among the three nuclear powers in NATO, along with Great Britain and the United States of America. In 1996, Paris suspended nuclear testing and relied on a simulation program that requires advanced computer solutions. That job was performed by Bull for three decades.
The company developed the Jupiter supercomputer, installed in Jülich, Germany, the first European system to reach an exascale level of computing power, and is also working on the development of the Alice Recoque system, envisioned as the future largest supercomputer in France.
Exascale computers represent a new generation of systems capable of performing at least one billion billion operations per second, which enables the modeling of extremely complex processes such as climate systems, the development of advanced materials, and large artificial intelligence models.
According to company sources, about 40 percent of the components in the Jupiter system are of European origin, while for the Alice Recoque project, a share of approximately 70 percent is targeted. In the long term, it should exceed 80 percent.
“The state will now be the sole owner and will not include private co-investors, since negotiations with potential partners did not result in an agreement,” the French noted.
(Vijesti.ba / FENA)
