Finland has offered to help South African researchers gain access to Lumi, one of Europe’s most powerful supercomputers, as the two countries try to turn long-standing goodwill into a formal AI partnership.
The offer came at a South Africa–Finland AI dialogue hosted by the Finnish embassy at the National Research Foundation in Pretoria. But no formal agreement exists yet.
“There is no formal collaboration agreement yet. This dialogue is to set the foundation for that,” Daan du Toit, deputy director-general for international cooperation and resources at the Department of Science, Technology and Innovation, told TechCentral.
Du Toit said government is willing to put money in, and wants Finland involved in the Presidential PhD Programme, launched in 2023 with an initial R1 billion for doctoral training. He credited Finnish support in the 1990s and 2000s with helping build the CSIR’s former Meraka Institute, which became the foundation of its AI capabilities.
What Finland is offering — and the catch
Damien Le Carpentier of CSC, the Finnish state- and university-owned company that runs Lumi, said CSC will host South African experts for short stays, provide training and exchanges for students and early-career researchers, help researchers and companies access Lumi or Finnish AI expertise, and pursue joint bids for EU funding through EuroHPC and Horizon Europe.
There is a limit. South African researchers cannot apply for Lumi time directly: under Lumi’s rules, a project’s principal investigator must be based in the EU or an associated country. Partnering with European groups is the main way in.
Scale of the gap
Lumi, housed in a former paper mill in Kajaani, sustains 379.7 petaflops on the benchmark used to rank supercomputers. It was the world’s third-fastest machine in 2023 and ranked 11th as of June 2026. It is about 95 times as powerful as the 4-petaflop system the Centre for High Performance Computing (CHPC) is installing to replace its Lengau supercomputer.
Finland could only afford a machine that size by pooling funds with other countries. “Everybody gets some share of a machine they could not have afforded alone,” Le Carpentier said. A planned Lumi AI Factory will cost more than €600 million, split between the European Commission and participating countries.
He warned that hardware is the easy part. Supercomputers last about five years, and each generation costs more. “You need to have the ecosystem around. Without it, your machine is pretty much useless.”
At home
Jabu Mtsweni of the CSIR, who sits on the panel reviewing South Africa’s national AI policy, said the CHPC’s GPU capacity is “limited.” Lengau entered the global top 500 at 121st in 2016 but has since dropped off; its 4-petaflop replacement is due by March, and Mtsweni hopes it will put South Africa back on the list.
“The computing gap still remains,” he said. “Sovereignty is not an event, but it is a journey.”
He said South Africa leads African AI adoption but lags on policy, noting the draft national AI policy “hit a snag” when it was withdrawn over fictitious sources. “AI adoption is outpacing policy.”
Based on reporting by TechCentral.
