Biography
Raphaëlle Achach is AI Project Manager for AI Factory France at GENCI, France's national agency for high-performance computing. She runs the programme that opens national AI computing resources to researchers, startups and companies, together with the services and support layer built around them.
She joined GENCI from CNRS, where she was recruited as project manager for AI and cybersecurity and went on to lead national programmes in computer science. Over that period she worked on the launch of the Jean Zay supercomputer, the national network of AI engineers and the AISSAI centre, and served as General Secretary for CNRS on PEPR IA, France's national priority programme in artificial intelligence. She is a business school graduate specialised in the management of innovation and new technologies.
Her work sits where national AI infrastructure meets actual adoption: how compute gets allocated, what it takes for a startup or a research team to get on the machines and stay on them, and how a public programme measures up against commercial cloud on speed, cost and support.
Session
- AI FoundationsSpeaker
Panel 19 - From BSC to Brussels: Europe's Supercomputing Bet on AI
Wednesday 23 September, 16:15 – 16:55Panel StageFrontier AI runs on supercomputers — and right now, Europe is on a building spree. The AI Factories initiative is wiring 13 supercomputers across the continent. Barcelona's MareNostrum 5 already sits in the global top tier. National centres are competing for GPUs, talent and political backing, on the bet that sovereign compute means sovereign AI. But does it? We bring together the people running Europe's biggest AI compute infrastructure, the policymakers funding the push, and the startups and researchers actually trying to use this hardware — to ask whether Europe is building real industrial capacity or expensive symbolism, who gets access, how it stacks up against the hyperscalers, and what the next five years of European AI infrastructure actually look like.