France ranks fifth globally in terms of its number of supercomputers – high-performance machines that can make millions, even billions, of calculations per second, and which are key to developing artificial intelligence. One of its most powerful, Jean-Zay, is dedicated to academic research.
It seems an unlikely location from which artificial intelligence will take over the world: a white-walled room about the size of a tennis court at the Paris-Saclay university in Orsay, south of Paris.
