Europe’s fastest supercomputer Jupiter was inaugurated Friday in Germany with its operators hoping it can help the continent in everything from climate research to catching up in the artificial intelligence race.

Based at Juelich Supercomputing Centre in western Germany, it is Europe’s first "exascale" supercomputer – meaning it will be able to perform at least one quintillion (or one billion billion) calculations per second.

Jupiter is housed in a centre covering some 3,600 metres (38,000 square feet) – about half the size of a football pitch – containing racks of processors, and packed with about 24,000 Nvidia chips, which are favoured by the AI industry.

Half the 500 million euros ($580 million) to develop and run the system over the next few years comes from the European Union and the rest from Germany.

Its vast computing power can be accessed by researchers across numerous fields as well as companies for purposes such as training AI models.

"Jupiter is a leap forward in the performance of computing in Europe," Thomas Lippert, head of the Juelich centre, told AFP, adding that it was 20 times more powerful than any other computer in Germany.

Lippert said Jupiter is the first supercomputer that could be considered internationally competitive for training AI models in Europe, which has lagged behind the US and China in the sector.