Nvidia and partners to build seven AI supercomputers for the U.S. gov't with over 100,000 Blackwell GPUs —combined performance of 2,200 ExaFLOPS of compute

Coming on the heels of the Vera Rubin-based supercomputers for Los Alamos National Laboratory, Nvidia announced on Tuesday that, together with partners, it would build seven ExaFLOPS-class AI supercomputers for Argonne National Laboratory. Two out of five systems will be built by Oracle and will use over 100,000 Blackwell GPUs, delivering a combined performance of up to 2,200 ExaFLOPS.

The first of five AI supercomputers for Argonne National Laboratory is Equinox, which will pack 10,000 Blackwell GPUs and serve as the first phase of the project, coming online in 2026. The second phase of the project — called Solstice — will be a 200 MW system packing over 100,000 Blackwell GPUs. The two systems will be connected to deliver an aggregate performance of 2,200 FP4 ExaFLOPS for AI computations.

"We are proud to announce that Nvidia, the U.S. Department of Energy and Oracle are partnering to build two AI factories at Argonne National Laboratories featuring Blackwell," said Dion Harris, the head of data center product marketing at Nvidia. "This collaboration aims to significantly boost America's scientific research and development productivity and establish U.S. leadership in AI. Phase one features the Equinox system, which is 10,000 Blackwell GPUs; phase two, providing 200 MW of AI infrastructure, totaling 2,200 ExaFLOPS of AI performance."

The systems will be used to build three-trillion-parameter AI simulation models as well as for classic scientific computing.

One interesting thing to note about the Equinox and Solstice supercomputers is that they will be built by Oracle, a company that nowadays is not widely known as a vendor that designs and builds completely bespoke supercomputers for customers, as traditional HPC vendors like Atos, Dell, or HPE do. Oracle's primary business emphasis is on cloud infrastructure enabling AI/HPC workloads rather than custom HPC system integration from the ground up. While Oracle has its Cloud@Customer option, these machines also run Oracle's software and are managed by the company. Whether Equinox and Solstice will be managed by Oracle remains to be seen.

In addition, the Argonne National Laboratory will expand its Argonne Leadership Computing Facility — which will be available to researchers and scientists through competitive national programs — with Nvidia-based supercomputers, including Tara, Minerva, and Janus. For now, it is unclear which platform these systems will use or whether they will be built by HPE or Oracle, but we can be sure they will deliver formidable performance.

"Argonne's collaboration with Nvidia and Oracle represents a pivotal step in advancing the nation's AI and computing infrastructure," said Paul K. Kearns, director of Argonne National Laboratory. "Through this partnership, we are building platforms that redefine performance, scalability and scientific potential. Together, we are shaping the foundation for the next generation of computing that will power discovery for decades to come."

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